Category: NEWS
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Bitcoin is ‘a hyped-up fraud’
- JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon previously slammed Bitcoin as a “Ponzi scheme”.
- On Thursday, he told CNBC’s Squawk Box that crypto is a decentralised Ponzi scheme and that Bitcoin is just “hyped-up fraud.”
- Dimon says people have lost billions of dollars and believes regulators should have put a stop to crypto “a long time ago.”
Not for the first time, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has labelled cryptocurrencies worthless.
On Thursday, during an interview with CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box,’ the noted crypto sceptic again referred to Bitcoin as nothing but a “hyped-up fraud.” He condemned the benchmark crypto asset as a “pet rock”, expressing his disapproval by dismissing discussions over BTC and other cryptocurrencies as waste of time.
Dimon says crypto ‘doesn’t do anything’
According to the JPMorgan CEO Bitcoin is not a store of value, and he showed his scepticism further by suggesting that there could be more than 21 million bitcoins in the future.
“How do you know it is going to stop at 21 million? Maybe it’s going to get to 21 million, and Satoshi’s picture is going to come up and laugh at you all. And say ta-da!”
Dimon also went ahead to refer to crypto as a decentralised Ponzi scheme. According to him the hype around digital assets has been extraordinary, stating on the CNBC show:
“You guys, you’ve all seen the analysis on Tether, the analysis on all these things – the lack of disclosures and it’s outrageous. Regulators should have stopped all these a long time ago. People have lost billions of dollars. If you look at its low-income people, in some cases retirees.”
On what he had to say about the crypto industry following the collapse of FTX, the JPMorgan exec summed up his outlook by noting that crypto “doesn’t do anything.”
“It’s a pet rock,” he told the Squawk Box hosts, adding that he doesn’t care about Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin now at its pre-FTX collapse level
- At press time, bitcoin (BTC) was trading at $21,507.97.
- Bitcoin price has surpassed where it stood on November 5 just prior to the FTX collapse.
- It now stands at its highest price since mid-September last year.
2022 was definitely not a very good year for crypto and especially for bitcoin (BTC) which was trading below $20K for quite a while before the year’s end. Bitcoin had plunged all the way down to about $15,000 in wake of the FTX collapse before attempting a comeback that saw it stuck close to $16,500 for several weeks before embarking on this current rally since the beginning of 2023.
Bitcoin has now corrected the price dip that was caused by the latest crypto misfortune, the FTX collapse that took place at the beginning of November. Early this morning, the price of bitcoin surged to a daily high of $21,564.50 before slightly pulling back to $21,507.97 at the time of writing.
What is behind today’s BTC price surge?
While the general cryptocurrency market is on a bullish trajectory, today’s sudden surge in bitcoin price is largely attributed to this morning’s larger-than-expected decrease in the Producer Price Index (PPI) for the just concluded month of December. The retail sales in December also dropped way below their forecast.
December’s PPI dropped by about 0.5% bringing the year-to-year rate down from 7.3% to 6.2%. The year-over-year rate dropped by about 5.5% against a forecast of a drop of 5.7%.
On the other hand, December retail sales dropped by 1.1% against a forecast drop of 0.8%. Combined with the decline in November, this marks the first time retail sales have dropped back-to-back by more than 1% post the pandemic.
