We Need to Think Straight about Electronic Payments
指出电子货币并非新型货币或新型物物交换，而是净额结算安排。电子技术是次要的，支付逻辑本身引发净支付经济性与多边净额结算风险之间的权衡，以及支付过程中债务创造等难题。作者呼吁加强基础研究，避免忽视根基的急功近利。
ELECTRONIC MONEY AND EMERGING PAYMENTS are sometimes regarded these days as being entirely new types of money. Some economists model them as new types of barter, in a sense that I'll try to be more specific about in a moment. Actually they are neither of these. What they are is netting arrangements. From this perspective, the fact that emerging payment arrangements use new electronic technologies is really secondary. It is not electronic technology, but rather the deeper logic of how payments are made, that raises very difficult questions about, for instance, what is the trade-off between the economies of net payment and the risk that multilateral netting is thought by many people to create. (That is, there is a risk, when you are part of a large payment coalition, that someone will fail to whom you are not directly exposed, but that the legal arrangements for mutualizing the losses will nevertheless impose a loss on you.) The fact that new payment arrangements tend to involve creation of debt in the process of payment, which also has to do with the logic of how the payments are made rather than with the coincidental fact that an electronic technology is used, raises another set of difficult issues. We are only now beginning to have adequate theories that address any of these issues. By a model being adequate, here I mean simply that economists feel comfortable about saying that our recommendations reflect our professional expertise, rather than being personal opinion off the top of our heads about what is right or wrong. We are only at the beginning of having research that we as economists can really be comfortable in claiming to be mature enough, well enough able to confront with facts (either in the form of history, or econometrics evidence, or whatever), to be regarded as a highly corroborated model with compelling welfare implications. And until such research has been accomplished, those of us who are asked for professional advice by policymakers are in an awkward position. The main points that I want to make in these remarks concern the urgency of this situation, the high value of the type of foundationally oriented research on payments that is being presented in this conference, and the fallacy of thinking that faster progress might be made if less scrupulous attention were to be paid to foundations.