Bitcoin has soared this year by more than ten-fold, defying all of the Wall Street veterans who have compared it to the Tulip Bubble and/or a Ponzi scheme. That doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is a legitimate investment; it just means that bubbles have no set expiration date.
The Nobel laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, appeared on Bloomberg television yesterday and had this to say about Bitcoin:
‘One of the main functions of government is to create currency. And Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight. So it seems to me it ought to be outlawed. It doesn’t serve any socially useful function.’
Consider the remarks Stiglitz made yesterday to our more detailed assessment along the same lines back in 2014. We wrote:
‘The business writers at Reuters are also dead wrong on Bitcoin being like other currencies whose ‘value depends on people’s confidence in it.’ Let’s take the U. S. dollar. Backing the use of the U. S. dollar as a world currency is the following: a Congress made up of 435 Representatives in the House and 100 Senators in the Senate; 535 people elected from all over the United States who have the power to tax the income of every American receiving wage, dividend, interest or even Social Security income at whatever rate they see fit in order to pay the Nation’s bills and debt obligations to other countries.
This post was published at Wall Street On Parade on November 30, 2017.
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