G20: India walks tightrope to form consensus amongst competing interests

business-standard.com:

If you ask G20 President India, the three biggest takeaways from the recently concluded meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) are that there is real progress on global debt reduction, that many countries are interested in seeking India’s help to build or improve their own digital payment systems, and that most nations have come around to India’s rather bearish views on cryptocurrency.

At the media briefing on Saturday, a visibly pleased Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das said most of the G-20 partners agreed that cryptocurrencies should be regulated with a view to controlling risks and checking proliferation.

“There is now wide recognition and acceptance of the fact that cryptocurrencies, or crypto assets, involve several major risks to financial stability, to monetary systems, to cyber security issues, and to overall financial stability … the effort is to develop an international framework, an international architecture to deal with this problem,” Das said.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva had earlier said if regulations failed, banning cryptocurrencies should be an option, something the RBI has been keen on.

Das, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and Economic Affairs Secretary Ajay Seth can look back at the first such meeting under India’s presidency with some satisfaction. However, getting all the G20 nations, with their own competing interests, to agree to the key agenda items was no easy task.

Business Standard spoke to more than half a dozen officials from the Ministries of Finance and External Affairs and the RBI, to get a sense of the discussions taking place behind the scenes. Just drafting the chair summary statement,