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success abroad (14) without the corresponding disadvantages of a threat to monetary monopoly at home. For them there has not yet been any real discontinuity breaking the link between national money supply and nominal demand. For them, therefore, the advent of electronic money truly will be a reversal - a distinct change of kind, not just degree -- insofar as one or more e-monies begin to gain widespread acceptance. When that happens the reserve centers too, for the first time, will face genuine currency competition on their own turf.
Indeed, if anything, the challenge is likely to be felt by the reserve centers first, even before any impacts spread onward to countries with less competitive currencies. The reason is evident. It is the reserve centers that are most wired - the most plugged into the new realm of electronic commerce. Online access is far greater in the U.S., Europe, and Japan than elsewhere. Hence if electronic money is to gain widespread acceptance anywhere, it will most probably happen initially in these same areas. It is no accident that Flooz, Beenz, and most other experiments to date have all originated in the world's most advanced economies, which are both financially sophisticated and computer literate. It is precisely these economies that are likely to be the most receptive to innovative new means of payment that can be used and transferred electronically.
Once some of these experiments begin to bear fruit, a new day will indeed have dawned, just as Kobrin (1997) and Friedman (1999) assert. As in countries with less competitive currencies, which already face invasion of their monetary space, the population of monies will be expanded, breaking the link between the supply of national money and nominal demand. Now, for the first time, central banks in the reserve centers too - the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of Japan - will be faced with the tricky dilemma of guiding expenditures when a significant fraction of the available money stock is comprised of currencies other than the state-sanctioned monetary unit (the dollar, euro, or yen).
Again, however, it is important to note where the root of the challenge lies. Kobrin, for instance, is right to be worried about the potentially profound impact of electronic money on monetary management. But he is right for the wrong reason, insofar as he stresses the control aspect of monetary policy rather than its autonomy. The problem is not, as Kobrin suggests, that the advent of e-money will make it difficult for central bankers to control monetary aggregates. In the reserve centers, as in those countries that have already experienced currency deterritorialization, the central bank's capacity to manage the stock of money denominated in the nation's own unit will not be directly affected. Bank reserves can still be adjusted to guide the growth of local bank money. The challenge, rather, as Friedman correctly argues, will be to the autonomy of central-bank policy - the capacity to manage demand -- owing to the increasing availability of attractive alternatives to national money, both central-bank currency and bank money. (15) Alan Greenspan and his counterparts in Europe and Japan will now be compelled to refine policy too, just as less fortunate central bankers have already been forced to do; that is, to treat the supply of national money more as a residual, taking due account of the availability of substitute currencies in circulation. The