Christian Ghymers，Past senior adviser to the European Commission , past-adviser to the Joint Vienna Institute

In his speech, Christian Ghymers explored the phenomenon of the global economy entering an era of currency regionalization and proposed a solution to the Triffin dilemma. He pointed out that more and more countries were beginning to use local currencies for cross-border payments and reserves, such as the internationalization of the renminbi. This trend raised three key questions: whether there was a move towards regional dollarization, whether a multi-polar monetary system would be more stable, and whether a multi-polar system could bring symmetry and balance. He argued that a critical multi-currency system would not bring stability and would exacerbate the Triffin Dilemma, emphasizing the wrongness of using local currencies as reserve currencies.

Ghymers mentioned that the Triffin Dilemma could not be solved by a competition between currencies of sovereign nations, and that an international reserve currency separate from any nation needed to be created i. e. a multilateral currency which is not the debt of any national economy. He proposed that a combination of Regional Monetary Arrangements (RMAs) and digital currencies could be part of the solution in the event of resistance to the dollar system. However, he argued that the renminbi and the euro could not yet fully replace the dollar, as this would lead them to become also “debtor/consumer of last resort” in order to be able to issue sufficient safe assets for supporting global liquidity needs.

He emphasized that the future international monetary system should avoid such a competition between major currencies for becoming debtors, which would inevitably lead to major financial instability. Instead a combination of RMAs and the creation of a multilateral single reserve currency could rebalance the system and provide sufficient global liquidity and stability. This would require, for example, to allow the IMF to issue/withdraw its own liability against national bonds in order to regulate global liquidity, all that ideally using CBDCs. This solution to the Triffin Dilemma does require only to agree to transform the IMF into a technical Lender-of-Last-Resort, without imposing no other coordination i.e. respecting better than any other formula national sovereignties, each country remaining responsible for the domestic impacts its own policies.

Christian Ghymers noted that the global economy was entering an era of currency regionalization and that the Triffin dilemma needed to be resolved through the creation of a multilateral reserve currency making compatible the development of regional monetary arrangements. He stressed the importance of avoiding competition among major currencies and achieving stability and balance in the international financial system through regional cooperation and digitalization processes.