Speech by Mr Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE), Marseille, 11 December 2018.
Ladies and Gentlemen, dear students,
It's a pleasure to be at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics today to discuss the trends affecting a key channel of the financing of the real economy: financial intermediation. This topic is well chosen the year of the tenth anniversary of both Lehman bankruptcy and Nakamoto's paper underlying the Bitcoin. This is not just a coincidence. For crypto-assets' proponents, the "old world" of bank-centric financial intermediation failed in 2008 and had to be replaced by disintermediated peer-to-peer systems like Bitcoin.
Where do we stand now?