President of Switzerland calls Libra a failure

The President of Switzerland had said that the Facebook-led Libra project, which seeks to create a global currency through its stablecoin, has failed. Libra’s currency is formed from a basket of fiat currencies, amongst them the US dollar, the Chinese renminbi, and the British pound.

“I don’t think (Libra has a chance in its current form), because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it,” Ueli Maurer, Switzerland’s finance minister, and president told Swiss broadcaster SRF. In an interview, Maurer said that “The project, in this form, has thus failed.”

Mauer’s comments hit particularly close to home as the Libra Association is headquartered in Switzerland. Furthermore, as recently as September, the Libra Association announced plans to apply to become a licensed payment system under the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) and asked FINMA for more advice on how to proceed with the project. 

Maurer is but the latest European finance minister to cast doubt on the project. 

Speaking to reporters At IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington in October, Germany’s finance minister, Otto Schulz, said he was “highly skeptical” about Libra, and that he was “not in favor of the successful creation of such a world currency because that is the responsibility of democratic states.”

And France’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, reiterated concerns against Libra in September, which he said threatened to undermine the “monetary sovereignty” of central banks. 

Internal strife within the Libra Association has also led several of its high profile members, such as Paypal, Visa, eBay and Mastercard to abandon the project. 

It’s not looking likely it’ll hit its mid-2020 launch date.