Robert Greene is vice president and chief of staff at Patomak Global Partners, a financial services consultancy, where his client work focuses on a range of risk and strategy issues related to derivatives markets, equity market structure, payments systems, and financial technology companies. He is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Technology and International Affairs Program and Asia Program, focusing on Chinese financial sector trends and on topics at the nexus of cyberspace governance, global finance, and national security.
Prior to joining Patomak, Greene was a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In this capacity, he primarily worked on banking, cryptocurrency, and insurance issues, as well as on financial inclusion and economic recovery initiatives launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Greene earned the Meritorious Service Award for his work at the Department.
Before Treasury, Greene was a consultant for the Eurasia Group, developing analyses of Chinese fintech and cyberspace governance policy initiatives, and was also a senior fellow at the Program for International Financial Systems (PIFS), affiliated with Harvard University. While at PIFS, Greene lived in Beijing for about two years, and was a visiting research fellow at Tsinghua University’s People’s Bank of China School of Finance National Institute of Financial Research—one of China’s top financial markets think tanks. During this time, his research focused on Chinese equity market reforms, Chinese conglomerate structures, and central bank digital currency. He also helped organize dialogues on fintech topics between U.S. and Asian government and industry leaders.
Before moving to Beijing, Greene was a strategic advisor at Patomak, and prior to that, was an associate at IBM’s Promontory Financial Group. In these roles, his client work focused on risk and strategy issues facing banks, broker-dealers, clearinghouses, digital token trading platforms, and exchanges. Earlier in his career, Greene worked for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, Harvard University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
Greene’s research on financial markets has been cited in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, as well as in studies published by various U.S. regulators, including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and by the Deutsche Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank. He has presented on financial sector topics to U.S. policymakers and regulators from across East and Southeast Asia.
Greene was a 2018-19 Luce Scholar and is proficient in Mandarin Chinese. He earned his M.P.P. from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and his B.B.A., magna cum laude, from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
As the BRICS bloc grows to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, this year could bring about greater renminbi use across emerging markets—thanks in part to the growth of renminbi financial channels across BRICS countries.
As the BRICS bloc expands, efforts by BRICS policymakers to increase global use of non-dollar currencies—particularly the Chinese renminbi—are accelerating. Washington should take note of how frustrations with the dollar are helping enable the rise of the renminbi in emerging markets and motivating strategic partners like India to push for greater use of non-dollar currencies.
Policymakers across Asia are rethinking the region's financial infrastructure—what this means for U.S. interests depends on how Washington responds.
Importantly, the future of large-value cross-border payments in Southeast Asia and the renminbi’s role depend in part on how Washington responds to efforts aimed at transforming local currency financial infrastructure in the region.
In this episode of Interpreting India, Robert Greene joins Priyadarshini D. to explore the use and impact of China’s digital yuan. What's China's motivation behind its e-CNY? How does it work? What are some of the domestic and international implications of its rollout?
Beijing sees the Ukraine crisis as its opportunity to gain influence over financial markets.
A global network of similarly-structured CBDCs could ultimately facilitate lower-cost payments relative to U.S.-regulated channels, thus diminishing the power of U.S. sanctions and curbing dollar usage in cross-border trade.
Beijing is pursuing alternative cross-border payments channels built upon central bank digital currencies as a way to erode the dominance of existing arrangements that rely heavily on the U.S. dollar and U.S.-regulated entities.
Unlike other major financial markets, Mainland China is home to many mixed conglomerates that control a range of large financial and non-financial firms.
China’s new digital currency, the e-CNY, could give Beijing valuable information about financial transactions and be used by Chinese firms to sidestep U.S. sanctions. But in order for it to meet lofty ambitions, there are some tricky structural questions that must be worked out first.
