Theoretical analysis demonstrates that international settlement can operate independently of national currency issuance, suggesting new conceptual frameworks for monetary architecture.
Key Points
To investigate whether tying cross-border financial settlement to the issuance of money is an inescapable theoretical necessity or merely a historical institutional choice.
Defined issuance strictly as the authority to determine monetary supply rather than the creation of units.
Evaluated historical and modern reform proposals (Keynes's Bancor, Special Drawing Rights, and multilateral central bank digital currencies) regarding their coupling of settlement and monetary authority.
Constructed and tested a conceptual reference architecture (AV) against criteria of internal consistency, institutional consistency, and theoretical gap closure.
Existing international reform frameworks consistently fail to decouple settlement from issuance, either centralizing monetary power in a new supranational entity or diffusing it across existing central banks.
The theoretical reference architecture successfully demonstrates that cross-border final settlement can exist without any participating entity possessing money creation, interest rate setting, or emergency liquidity powers.