To me, context is about pattern recognition.

It's connecting the dots.

It's giving readers an ability to synthesize

a number of different perspectives

so they can understand how the greater whole works,

because nothing really occurs in isolation anymore.

I'm Tim O'Brien and I'm the senior executive editor at Bloomberg Opinion.

On our platform, we ask tough questions and solve complex problems with the facts in mind.

Start exploring our opinion coverage and more at Bloomberg.com slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots

podcast my co-host Joe Wisenthal is away this week. I've actually noticed a

pattern to Joe's absences which is that he suspiciously goes missing whenever we're scheduled to talk about negative rates on the show.

In any case, we recently had the annual gathering of monetary policy makers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and as you can imagine,

negative interest rates were a big feature of that meeting.

And in fact, the title for this year's symposium was

challenges for monetary policy, which kind of gives you an idea of the

head space that a lot of central bankers are operating in at the moment.

But one of the most interesting things to come out of Jackson

Hole this year, certainly a thing that got a lot of attention was a speech by Bank of

England Governor Mark Carney, where he talked about the idea of getting rid of the dollar as a reserve currency and basically

replacing it with a virtual currency that would look a lot like Facebook's Libra in the sense that it could be a sort of consortium of digital

currencies maintained by central banks, a multi-polar virtual currency.

He actually called it a synthetic hegemonic currency or S.H.C. for short.

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