Courtesy of Pam Martens.
While the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress finesse a delicate dance around the potential criminality of Bitcoin trading and other cryptocurrencies, NYU Professor and economist Nouriel Roubini has launched a savage attack on the “currencies,” calling them “a joke,” a “scam,” a “sh*tcoin,” and no better than “cocaine drug pushers.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Roubini is also the man who correctly called the impending financial crisis that landed in 2008 while Federal regulators wore their blinders about the corruption and leverage building inside the largest banks on Wall Street.
Roubini, a long-time critic of Bitcoin, has launched his fiercest comments on cryptocurrencies in the past 24 hours on his Twitter page and in an interview on Bloomberg TV. In the Bloomberg interview, Roubini had this to say:
“Crypto currencies are not even currencies. They’re a joke…The price of Bitcoin has fallen in a week by how much – 30 percent. It goes up 20 percent one day, collapses the next. It is not a means of payment, nobody, not even this blockchain conference, accepts Bitcoin for paying for conference fees cause you can do only five transactions per second with Bitcoin. With the Visa system you can do 25,000 transactions per second…Crypto’s nonsense. It’s a failure. Nobody’s using it for any transactions. It’s trading one sh*tcoin for another sh*tcoin. That’s the entire trading or currency in the space where’s there’s price manipulation, spoofing, wash trading, pump and dumping, frontrunning. It’s just a big criminal scam and nothing else.”
(That last sentence could equally describe what’s going on among high frequency traders at hedge funds and big banks on Wall Street — but we digress.)
Later in the interview, Roubini adds this: “There are millions of degenerate gamblers that are retail suckers, and they’re gonna create something where they can leverage not 10 times, not 50 times, but 100 times. It’s worse than those drug pushers who give you crack cocaine for free to get you addicted and then lead you to be broke….” (See the interview at 19:30 elapsed time on the Bloomberg video here.)
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