Sweden Develops New Electronic Currency

Recently, Sweden has been working on making a digital form of currency. I first saw this when I was making a top ten list for people to follow on Twitter for a Rhetoric and Media class I am taking at Lewis and Clark College. I immediately starting thinking of ways Sweden could replace paper money with digital money and started doing research. According to Financial Times, the amounts of notes and coins have decreased in circulation by 40 percent from 2009 in Sweden. Digital transfer of currency through things like internet shopping has already started taking over.

Cecilia Skingsley, deputy governor at the Riksbank, told the Financial Times, “This is as revolutionary as the paper note 300 years ago. What does it mean for monetary policy and financial stability? How do we design this: a rechargeable card, an app or another way?” This reveals Riksburg bank is still in the beginning stages, but they believe it could have a huge impact on the way people spend money. 



Today in my economics class, we talked about black market exchanges. This term black market just means it does not account for the total GDP for the country. Most of the time, this consists of small unrecorded transactions between people. Electronic currency will replace this setback in tracking money and make results for economics more accurate.

No one has done this to the extent Sweden is planning on doing. The process might take a few years, but if it is successful, they will set the bar for the rest of the world. Technology is being integrated in so many new ways of society, why not currency as well?