Economists seem to be really bagging on crypto lately.
Speaking to the Korea Times, noted economist Andy Xie said that there’s basically no way that cryptocurrencies will be recognized as legal currency.
“Bitcoin is primarily a gambling instrument for Chinese, Koreans and Japanese,” Andy Xie, a vocal critic of the bitcoin craze, told The Korea Times.
“Even though so many argue it could be used to replace the fiat currency, its huge volatility makes it impossible.”
“Cryptocurrency will never be recognized as legal currency, because the governments cannot issue bonds in that. Its volatility could bankrupt such a government,” he said.
Xie – whose greatest hits include predicting the Asian Financial Crisis – also contends that while Bitcoin has been ripping higher, Wall Street would never allow it to reach its 2018 highs. He says that futures traders in the U.S. will likely push down the price when it gets that high, and that they’ll keep on pushing until traders in East Asia panic and get out of Dodge. “Then they will square position to cash out,” he said.
Xie wasn’t the only economist who criticized crypto this week; at a recent conference in Taiwan, he of the weird wall treatments, Prof. Nouriel Roubini, said that cryptos will eventually “all go to zero” and that a “museum of failed coins” will exist where people collect bitcoin, ether, and monero.
Roubini argued that the world doesn’t need cryptocurrencies as the revolution is already happening in the fintech space, and artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, the Internet of Things (IOT) will “fix” things.
Dr. Doom also noted payments initiatives in developing countries such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India and Alipay in China, which will take care of the digital future.
“We don’t need that cesspool of stinking shi*coins,” Roubini said.
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