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Authored by Huw van Steenis via The FT,

How technology disrupts the payments system gives policymakers pause for thought...

Few issues in central banking are more likely to provoke anxiety than the fear of losing control of one’s currency.

The past few days have provided another perfect illustration of this point. On Monday the Chinese central bank banned initial coin offerings of bitcoin-type currencies, leading to a fall in the value of some cryptocurrencies of as much as 20 per cent.

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Dear President Trump,

Over the last couple of years I’ve been all over TV… from Fox News to CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg. I’ve been telling our fellow Americans that the financial global elite was planning to issue their own globalist currency called special drawing rights, or SDRs.

And that those elites would use this new currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.

As discussed here in mid-August, when China reported its latest credit data, for the first time in 9 months China's trillion Shadow Banking Industry - defined as the sum of Trust Loans, Entrusted Loans and Undiscounted Bank Loans - contracted.

These three key components combined resulted in a 64BN yuan drain in credit from China's economy, the first negative print since October, seen by analysts as more evidence that Beijing’s campaign to contain shadow banking and quash risks to the financial system, is starting to bear fruit.

In a move that stunned China currency watchers, late on Friday (local time) Bloomberg reported that China’s central bank decided that it would remove a reserve requirement for financial institutions trading in FX forwards for clients by cutting it to zero from 20% currently. The change would take place on Monday, September 11 (it has yet to be confirmed).

Eurodollar options traders are abandoning positions targeting another Fed rate increase this year, as the market-implied probability of a quarter-point hike in December plunges below 25 percent.

The latest Chicago Mercantile Exchange data, for trading on Thursday, show a sharp drop in open interest for options that are a pillar of a December 2017 eurodollar put-fly position, a trade that hinges on the market pricing in a hike that month.