In recent years, the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, has repeatedly claimed that money is a public good. This formulation has become one of the central rhetorical pillars of the digital euro project. When the ECB announced in October 2025 that it was moving into the next phase of this initiative, Lagarde once again emphasized: “Money is a public good. Full stop.”
The message is clear: even as private payment alternatives proliferate, central-bank-issued money is portrayed as a social necessity—something the state must allegedly protect and provide.
Yet this argument has no economic foundation. A public good is not a political metaphor; it is a well-defined economic concept. A public good is one whose consumption by one person does not diminish the ability of others to enjoy it, and from whose use no potential beneficiary can be reasonably excluded. In short, a public good does not become scarce as the number of users grows, nor is access to it meaningfully restricted.
The textbook example is a lighthouse. My seeing its signal does not reduce anyone else’s ability to see it. Nor can the lighthouse operator decide which ships are allowed to benefit from the light—it shines for all, regardless of who paid and who did not.
A sculpture in an open square works in much the same way. Any passerby can look at it, and one person’s gaze does not prevent another from enjoying it at the same time. But this example also reveals an important boundary case: if the sculpture becomes a major tourist attraction and crowds form around it, competition emerges. Not everyone can approach it simultaneously, and the space surrounding the sculpture turns into a scarce good.
Although city buses are commonly referred to as “public transport,” in economic terms, they are not public goods either. A bus has limited capacity: once it is full, an additional passenger cannot board, and existing passengers experience discomfort. Access is also restricted—one needs a ticket, and without it, entry can be denied. This illustrates a broader point: even goods commonly labeled “public” remain public only as long as their use does not affect others’ opportunities to use them.
Money is a good of an entirely different nature. If I have one euro, you cannot have that same euro at the same time. Access to new money is deliberately restricted: it must be earned, exchanged, or inherited. It cannot simply be printed at home. The entire monetary system is built on the fact that each monetary unit belongs to one person at a given moment, and its use is governed by contracts, legal norms, and institutional constraints. Money satisfies none of the criteria of a public good. It is not even “almost” a public good—it is the opposite of one.
Money exists precisely to help us deal with the scarcity of other goods. Imagine a world in which all goods were like a lighthouse light—unlimited. In such a world, money would be meaningless. There would be no need for exchange, because there would be no need to obtain anything from others. Prices would disappear because there would be no alternatives and no opportunity costs. Saving would lose its point, because nothing would ever be scarce in the future. Money’s functions—as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value—are possible only because the world is not made up of public goods. Money is a civilizational tool for coping with finitude. Calling money a public good, therefore, turns its very logic upside down.
Historically, money emerged as a private solution that states gradually monopolized. Lagarde’s use of the “public good” label serves to justify the contemporary role of central banks in the monetary system. To be sure, central banks can and do provide certain public goods: legal certainty, price stability, basic standards, and infrastructure. But money itself does not become a public good as a result.
The confusion surrounding the digital euro stems precisely from this ambiguity. In the digital realm, the distinction between “public” and “private” money lies in who issues it, not in the nature of the good itself. A bank deposit, a cryptocurrency, or a digital euro is not a public good simply because it exists on a server rather than on a piece of paper. Most money used in modern transactions is already electronic, created and administered by commercial banks. If electronic money were to disappear overnight and we all reverted to central-bank-issued banknotes, money would not suddenly become a public good. Its essence would remain unchanged: a scarce medium of exchange reflecting the scarcity of other goods.
The moment money became unlimited, it would simply cease to have any meaning at all.
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