“We need to think about new tools and a different way of working with the [AI] market in a more collaborative way,” says Nikhil Rathi, CEO of the UK’s finance watchdog. European regulators and central bankers have warned that rulemaking cannot keep pace with rapid advances in agentic artificial intelligence and have called for guardrails to protect the financial system. Bank of England deputy governor Sarah Breeden is one of several central bankers who have said that agentic AI could amplify volatility during bouts of market stress. Breeden questioned if guardrails are needed, “analogous to circuit breakers or kill switches that would limit or stop trading market-wide if faulty AI models cause market meltdown,” she said at the European Central Bank’s annual meeting in Sintra, Portugal, on Tuesday. Read more
EU authorities already preemptively sanctioned Russia’s digital ruble in 2025 as part of measures in response to the country’s war against Ukraine. Russia’s central bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina, confirmed that the country was prepared to roll out its central bank digital currency (CBDC) in two months, following the timeline it laid out last year. According to a Thursday report from Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti, Nabiullina said that “everyone is ready” for a Sept. 1 digital ruble launch. The CBDC will launch as a complement to Russia’s fiat currency, the ruble, and will initially be accepted by financial and credit institutions. “We want the digital ruble to be in demand by people and businesses, to be convenient, and, of course, we're constantly discussing [...] what functionality to develop,” said Nabiullina in a translated statement. Read more
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the French central bank governor and Coinbase CEO clashed over whether trust in money comes from institutions or decentralized Bitcoin. The long-running tension between central banks and Bitcoin resurfaced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where senior executives and policymakers debated regulation versus innovation in digital finance. Trust in money must come from regulated public institutions rather than private crypto issuers, French central bank Governor François Villeroy de Galhau said during a panel titled “Is Tokenization the Future?” on Wednesday. “The guarantee for trust is independence on the central bank side,” Galhau said, adding: “I trust more independent central banks with a democratic mandate than private issuers of Bitcoin.” Read more