Britain is not building a CBDC — not officially. But through a sequence of regulatory decisions on stablecoins, the UK has quietly assembled the functional equivalent. Here is why a synthetic approach may outperform a sovereign digital pound.

Central banks have been buying gold at levels not seen since the 1960s. This is not inflation hedging or diversification — it is a structural recalibration of trust in the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with implications that most market participants have yet to price in.

As stablecoins surpass $300 billion and settle more than the US ACH network, central banks face an uncomfortable question: is the CBDC race already lost to private digital money?

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, USDC's reserves fundamentally changed — shifting from interest-rate risk to counterparty risk. The New York Fed's latest research reveals the $308bn stablecoin market is now deeply entangled with traditional finance, and the feedback loop runs both ways.