It is indeed necessary to have both the heart and the stomach well hung to pretend to treat and exchange such currencies with incredible volatility. They are, in reality, only an instrument – yet another – of pure speculation offering zero intrinsic value! Buy a property and you will still have it if the market were to deteriorate. Buy a stock on the stock market and you’ll still own part of the business if the market crashes. Buy bitcoins and you will just have to throw your computer in the trash if its value were to liquefy (as is currently the case) because this thing is only a piece of code that you cannot strictly do nothing and someone else at the end of the pyramid had the good idea to sell you.
As fleeting as a summer love
This generalized hysteria in fact tells a banal story that has been experienced many times. It reflects a collective contagion having inflated in the past the valuation of assets much more tangible than a cryptocurrency – as ephemeral as a summer love – but just as banal as the game of musical chairs where places are limited and whose only those who sell first get away with it. This market – which today is worth a few trillions of dollars and euros less for having already largely devalued in recent months – is only worth it thanks to other players who agree to push higher and further. the “schmilblick”.
Thousands of gullible investors…poor
More serious – much more worrying and sadder too: crypto thrived on a breeding ground of young and precarious speculators and investors who could not afford to invest in the stock market or in real estate, which was too expensive for them. Let’s be realistic and honest: in an environment where the new generations are much worse off than their elders, in a context where it seems so easy to win by speculating thanks to the total deregulation and liberalization of capital flows, the crypto has sold dreams to young people, who have found in it an ideal way to stand out from the elders. In a world where inequalities are aberrant, where the vast majority of young people around the world are now the new poor, the one and only weapon available to this caste of untouchables allowing them to distinguish themselves was crypto, which was able to time to convince them that they would follow in the footsteps of the rich and powerful, incidentally using an avant-garde instrument.
Alas for these young people and for these poor people for whom crypto was literally an ideology as they swore only by it, the rich investors got richer because it was they alone who were at the helm of these platforms and this sham of market. Today, thousands of gullible investors – young and old, but poor – suffer head-on and even to their last pennies this latest avatar of a savage capitalism which neither knows nor can prosper except on the corpses of the most fragile . Again and again, it is those who can least afford to lose who are harmed and ruined.
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Michel Santi is a macro-economist, specialist in financial markets and central banks. He is the founder and managing director of Art Trading & Finance.
He has just published “Armchair 37” prefaced by Edgar Morin. He is also the author of a new book: “The Testament of a Disillusioned Economist”. His Facebook page and feedTwitter
19 May 2022, 6:40