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ECB MEMBER COMPARES CRYPTO SECTOR TO SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRASH
The European Central Bank, busy along with the rest of the West trying to fuel WWIII over Ukraine, took time out to say cryptos are a risk comparable to the subprime mortgage crash of 2007-08.
“[The] strong appeal of crypto-assets, especially unbacked ones, is a cause for concern given the lack of fundamentals, the number of recent scandals, their use in illegal activities and the high volatility of their prices,” ECB board member Fabio Panetta said in a talk at Columbia University. “All this points to unsound underlying market dynamics.”
By unbacked, Panetta apparently meant that the endless reams of central bank paper somehow has magical value because governments have the power to tax.
But of course, if those same governments tried taxing their way to balanced budgets and debt reduction, Western economies would collapse even more than they are already doing.
There’s literally not enough productivity to suck out to pay for the horrendously profligate spending.
COVID crushed what remained of functioning, nominally productive economies in the tired West. Now war is accelerating death, in every sense.
Little wonder that bankers like Panetta are looking to scapegoat cryptos, as Western leaders including Biden have attempted to frame Vladimir Putin for hyperinflation.
Cryptos might or might not have further to fall. But that has little to do with their lack of “intrinsic value” as a sector.
Many crypto projects are garbage. So are many other commercial endeavors.
But crypto as a sector embodies one of the most innovative tech developments of the current epoch.
It’s a new paradigm for creating and delivering software services—including some very innovative ones—and distributing rewards and opportunities for investment and participation in novel decentralized ways.
It’s software AND internet 3.0. Many believe that’s a pretty big deal.
The fact that there will be winners and losers, hardly makes the crypto sector unique. As always, participants should do their financial homework.
But central banks need to retain control over currency creation, and that’s the real message behind Panetta’s supposed concern for the masses. Governments want to continue to tax via the “back door”, by printing money to pay obligations, sucking the value out the currencies for locked in rubes who have to use those currencies to buy food, energy, shelter and so on.
They know exactly what they’re doing, though they pretend to be lofty-minded technocrats just sincerely struggling to get the liquidity right. Kristalina Georgieva, head of the board at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said at a CNBC event on 22 April:
“I think we are not paying sufficient attention to the law of unintended consequences. We take decisions with an objective in mind and rarely think through what may happen that is not our objective. And then we wrestle with the impact of it.
“Take any decision that is a massive decision, like the decision that we need to spend to support the economy. At that time, we did recognize that maybe too much money in circulation and too few goods, but didn’t really quite think through the consequences in a way that upfront would have informed better what we do.”
Meanwhile Panetta was attempting to shift focus at Columbia, not letting a crisis go to waste:
“So crypto-assets are speculative assets that can cause major damage to society. At present they derive their value mainly from greed, they rely on the greed of others and the hope that the scheme continues unhindered. Until this house of cards collapses, leaving people buried under their losses.”
The projection was strong, indeed, for a Euro region collapsing in war, demographically imploding, and bracing to be overrun (again) by North Africa and the Middle East. No wonder they need WWIII, and China’s proven brand of totalitarian control.