Dan Awrey is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. Dan’s teaching and research interests reside in the area of financial regulation and, more specifically, the regulation of banks, investment funds, derivatives markets, payment systems, and financial market infrastructure. Dan has undertaken research and provided advice at the request of organizations including the Bank for International Settlements, U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve Board, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, Her Majesty’s Treasury, UK Financial Conduct Authority, Commonwealth Secretariat, and European Securities and Markets Authority. His research has been featured in publications including the Yale Law Journal, New York University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Yale Journal on Regulation, Harvard Business Law Review, and the Journal of Comparative Economics.
Dan is a co-author of one of the leading textbooks on financial regulation, Principles of Financial Regulation, published by Oxford University Press. Dan is also a founding co-managing editor of the Journal of Financial Regulation.
Before joining Cornell in 2019, Dan was Professor of Financial Regulation at the University of Oxford, where he was also Director of the MSc program in Law and Finance between 2014-2016. Before entering academia, Dan was director of law and corporate affairs for a global investment management firm and, prior to that, a securities lawyer at a major Canadian law firm.
Gresham’s New Law: Technology, Regulation, and the Future of Money
Abstract:
This paper is the introductory chapter to my forthcoming book “Gresham’s New Law” (Princeton, 2023). The book is about the past, present, and future of money. New technologies are rapidly expanding the frontier of what is possible in the realm of money and payments. Prominent examples include payment platforms like PayPal and Venmo, mobile money networks such as Kenya’s M-Pesa, and so-called “stablecoins”. Ultimately, these new institutions seek to compete with the current gatekeepers of our monetary system: banks. Yet despite their apparent technological superiority, the institutions that populate this new “shadow” monetary system suffer from an enormous and deeply entrenched disadvantage. That disadvantage is the law. New Money chronicles the rise of the shadow monetary system, explores its core institutional features, and explains how the law puts it at a comparative disadvantage to the conventional banking system. It then asks what we can learn from money’s past and present about how to build a safer, faster, and more inclusive future.