Bitcoin and other privately issued cryptocurrencies have generated a frenzy of excitement, with most of the analysis focused on their appeal and apparent drawbacks. But relatively less attention has been paid to an even more important development: the increasing likelihood that countries will shift partly or entirely to a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Economists have long recognized that money performs three functions. As a medium of exchange, it enables transactions that otherwise would require difficult bartering (as in trading chickens for a car). As a unit of account, it allows one to know whether one has saved or dissaved…

Technological change is upending finance. Bitcoin has gone from being an obsession of anarchists to a $1trn asset class that many fund managers insist belongs in any balanced portfolio. Swarms of digital day-traders have become a force on Wall Street. PayPal has 392m users, a sign that America is catching up with China’s digital-payments giants. Yet, as our special report explains, the least noticed disruption on the frontier between technology and finance may end up as the most revolutionary: the creation of government digital currencies, which typically aim to let people deposit funds directly with a central bank, bypassing conventional…

Nigeria appears to have turned the corner and her fate no longer rests with those protecting their oil wells or those nostalgic about their Civil War scars or even those hallucinating about 2023. Truth be told, these same people – those bent on protecting their advantage as well as those sentimental about the so-called non-negotiability of Nigeria’s ‘unity’ - are the very people that have brought this country to its present sorry pass. As the bitter truth stares everyone in the face, the time to face reality has come. Whichever choice that is made eventually will depend on the kind…

A few hours after it was made known that heroic government troops had invaded the fortress where some Kaduna school kids were being held and liberated them by fire and by force, Okon jumped into snooper’s room totally breathless with his eyes almost popping out in insane excitement. Yours sincerely was totally flustered by this early morning invasion of his privacy. But the crazy boy was in no mood to be lightly dismissed. “Oga, you see now, I get power pass all dis dem palm wine prophets and tombo journalists. He don reach twelve years now since I see and…