Courtesy of Pam Martens
Congressman Ted Budd of North Carolina
Yesterday, Bitcoin put on a display that should put to rest any lingering doubts that it is a stable currency that could be used to pay for products or services. The current month Bitcoin futures contract at the CME swung between a low of $30,250 to a high of $43,530 – a difference of $13,280 in one trading session. From its intraday high of $58,140 on Wednesday, May 12, to its close one week later on Wednesday, May 19, Bitcoin had lost 34 percent of its value.
As we explained here at Wall Street On Parade on May 12, some of the smartest minds in the investment community think Bitcoin is very bad for America. One of the most iconic investors in America, Warren Buffet, stated in May 2018 that Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.” In January of the same year, Buffet told CNBC in an interview that “In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending.”
Also in 2018, Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit and PayPal, wrote a detailed critique of Bitcoin for Vox, under the headline: “Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history.”
In July 2019, NYU Professor and economist Nouriel Roubini offered this analysis of Bitcoin and crypto in a Bloomberg News interview: “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.”
None of that sound logic seems to have found its way to the office of Congressman Ted Budd, who represents North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.
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