https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-only-used-money-laundering-224024786.html
Wall Street veteran Steve Eisman
rose to fame by shorting the sub-prime mortgage market ahead of last decade’s
financial crisis. Now, he’s similarly-bearish on a new asset class:
cryptocurrency.
Eisman, whose career is
chronicled in The Big Short, told CNBC that he has yet to meet anyone who can
persuasively argue that cryptocurrencies have social utility.
He said:
"I’m not an expert on
cryptocurrency, but I have my doubts about it. My doubts center on the fact
that, ‘What’s the social utility of cryptocurrency?’ I’m not talking about
blockchain. The technology, I think, has real value. But currency markets are
the most liquid, most efficient markets, probably of any markets that exist.”
While conceding that there are a
few exceptions to this rule — Venezuela, for instance — the Neuberger Berman
portfolio manager argued that in developed countries the only use cases for
cryptocurrency are speculative investing and money laundering.
"I think the social utility, at
least in developed countries, is extremely small. The only thing I can really
figure out the usage of it is that it’s good for speculation, and it’s good for
money laundering.
The interview marked the second
time in this week alone that Eisman had bashed bitcoin. As CCN reported, he
said at an industry convention in Hong Kong that he believes the asset class
has no legitimate purpose and that he won’t touch it.
Even so, Eisman reiterated that
he has no plans to make bitcoin his next “big short,” both because he does not
specialize in currency trading and because he does not believe it is possible
to assign bitcoin a fair market value.
"It’s like arguing how many angels
can dance on the head of a pin,” he said. “I have no idea how to value it, and
I don’t think anybody else does either.”