雅思阅读 60: Who Backs Your Money?（你的钱，由谁背书？）

改编自 Federal Reserve / ECB / 中国人民银行通知 / IMF（2025-2026）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/barr20260331a.htm

Reading Passage

A. For more than a decade, the world of digital money has lurched between mania and crash. Bitcoin and its thousands of imitators promised a currency free from banks, governments and inflation, but their wild price swings made them poor stores of value and awkward means of payment. Out of that disillusionment grew a quieter, more practical category: the stablecoin. A stablecoin is a digital token, usually pegged one-to-one to a traditional currency such as the dollar, and supposedly backed by safe assets held in reserve. Advocates argue that such tokens can settle payments around the world faster and more cheaply than the legacy banking system, while drawing on the trust that the dollar already enjoys. By 2025, stablecoins had moved from the fringes of crypto speculation into the corridors of policy. Governments, central banks and finance ministries suddenly faced a choice they had spent years avoiding: do they regulate private digital money, issue their own, or pretend the problem will go away? The answers, emerging across three very different jurisdictions, reveal how sharply the world now disagrees about what money is allowed to be.

B. The United States moved first — and in a distinctly American direction. In July 2025, President Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, known as the GENIUS Act, the first federal law to set out a regulatory framework specifically for stablecoin issuers. The law requires issuers to hold adequate reserves, disclose them, and submit to supervision, with the aim of channelling the stablecoin boom into something that looks more like a tightly regulated payment instrument than a speculative token. Officials argue that widespread adoption of dollar-backed stablecoins would modernise creaky payments infrastructure and reinforce the international role of the dollar. Yet the same administration took the opposite view of its own digital money. A January 2025 executive order prohibited federal agencies from developing, issuing or promoting a central bank digital currency — a digital form of the dollar issued directly by the Fed — and ordered existing work on it to stop. The logic was deliberate: private dollars, regulated, are to be encouraged; a digital dollar issued by the central bank is not.

C. China has travelled in the opposite direction. In February 2026, seven agencies including the People's Bank of China issued a joint notice reaffirming that virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether and Tether have no legal-tender status and cannot be circulated as money within the country. Worse, almost every activity surrounding them — exchange between virtual and fiat money, trading, acting as a central counterparty — is classified as an illegal financial activity. The rationale is familiar to anyone who has watched Beijing's approach to finance: capital must not be able to leave the country or be raised outside the state's view. At the same time, China has spent years piloting its own state-run digital currency, the digital yuan, under the careful eye of the central bank. The contrast with Washington could hardly be starker: where the United States is attempting to harness private dollars on a public ledger, China is banning private ledgers altogether and pushing its citizens toward one, state-controlled, digital form of cash.

D. Europe, as so often, has taken the rule-based middle path. The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation already set out licensing and reserve requirements, and in 2025 the European Central Bank began warning finance ministers about the risks of "multi-issuance" stablecoins — tokens issued by many competing private companies, any one of which could face a run if its reserves were doubted. The ECB's argument, set out in a 2026 speech, is that well-designed stablecoins do not actually displace central bank money as a settlement asset; they are dominated by settlement solutions that ultimately rest on central bank reserves, because only a central bank can expand liquidity elastically in a crisis. Across the Channel, the Bank of England issued a consultation in November 2025 on regulating sterling stablecoins, while sounding a particular alarm about "unhosted" digital wallets — wallets that do not collect personal data and therefore make transactions harder to monitor. Europe's concern is not so much whether to allow private digital money as how to keep it identifiable, supervised and runnable off a cliff if a token loses its peg.

E. Underneath these three approaches lies one genuinely old question: should money be a public utility or a private product? When money was gold coins, the question hardly arose. When it became banknotes, central banks spent a century persuading the public that the state's promise was more trustworthy than a bank's. Now, as the International Monetary Fund notes, tokenisation is bringing the question back. A wholesale central bank digital currency — a direct digital claim on the central bank used between banks — is being explored for interbank settlement, while privately issued tokens compete for everyday payments. The United States, China and Europe have each, in 2025 and 2026, placed a different bet: on regulated private tokens, on a state digital currency, or on a cautious supervisory hybrid. None of these bets has yet been tested by a crisis. The next global run — on a bank, a currency, or a stablecoin — will reveal which model the public actually trusts when money, as it occasionally does, begins to look like nothing more than a promise on a screen. History offers a caution here. The last time private banknotes competed with one another at scale, in the nineteenth century, the result was repeated failures, lost savings and a slow drift toward central-bank monopoly; whether digital tokens, backed by reserves and supervised in real time, can avoid that fate is the assumption on which the GENIUS Act, MiCA and the digital yuan all, in their different ways, rest. If the assumption holds, money may quietly become faster, cheaper and borderless. If it does not, the next financial crisis will arrive wearing the costume of a payment innovation.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The United States' bet on regulated private stablecoins ii. China's prohibition — and its own state digital currency iii. Europe's cautious, rule-based approach iv. The old question returning: public versus private money v. A brief history of the nineteenth-century gold rush vi. How blockchains are programmed vii. The global trade in coffee exports

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What did the U.S. GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, do? A. It created the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoin issuers. B. It banned all cryptocurrencies outright. C. It launched a U.S. central bank digital currency. D. It made Bitcoin legal tender.

6. How does China's February 2026 notice treat virtual currency trading? A. It classifies related activities as illegal financial operations. B. It fully legalises and encourages them. C. It treats them as tax-free investments. D. It transfers their supervision to private banks.

7. According to the ECB, how do well-designed stablecoins compare with central-bank settlement? A. They are dominated by settlement ultimately based on central bank money. B. They have entirely replaced central bank reserves. C. They are completely risk-free. D. They work only within China.

8. What concern did the Bank of England raise in its 2025 consultation? A. "Unhosted" wallets make transactions harder to monitor. B. Sterling stablecoins settle too quickly. C. Sterling should be withdrawn entirely. D. Banks should issue no digital money whatsoever.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The January 2025 U.S. executive order directed federal agencies to accelerate development of a U.S. CBDC.
10. Stablecoins are typically designed to hold a stable value, often pegged to a traditional currency.
11. The European Union has so far taken no interest in regulating digital assets.
12. A wholesale CBDC is intended primarily for settlement between banks and financial institutions.
13. Most stablecoins are currently used to pay routine household bills at supermarkets.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Stablecoins are private digital tokens usually (14) __________ by safe assets, while a wholesale central bank digital currency represents a direct digital claim on the (15) __________ bank.

答案与解析

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