To begin the conversation the host asked how Rickards’ saw the cryptocurrency and the craze unfolding. Rickards’ pressed, “It is interesting. I looked at it last night and it was nearing $3,000 for one bitcoin. It could be closing $4,000 by tonight.”
“Bitcoin is a form of money. I have no quarrel with that. When people say the price is $2,000 or $3,000 it is still not an investment and has no yield. When you buy stock in a company you can analyze the company, the management, the assets, etc. When you buy a bond you can see the interest rate, who is the issuer, creditworthiness, inflation. There are ways to analyze all of these things.”
“There are ways to analyze these things. When you buy a bitcoin and give dollars, euro, yuan to get bitcoin all you are doing is exchanging one form of money for another. It has no yield. There are no bitcoin investable assets. There are no bitcoin bonds. You are just swapping money. When you see the price going to $2,000-$3,000 you can say that bitcoin is going up, but you can also say that the dollar is going down.”
Jim Rickards is a currency expert and economist who examines the complex dynamics of geopolitics and global capital. Rickards’ has worked as a portfolio manager, lawyer and held various senior positions on Wall Street. His most recent New York Times best seller, The Road to Ruin offers his critical analysis of financial crises and what he believes is ahead for the global economy.
When speaking on the trend and value of the cryptocurrency Rickards’ noted, “People are expressing a liquidity preference for bitcoin as a form of money over dollars. That’s one theory of valuation. What’s the evidence for that? None. Because, if that were true, if you were losing confidence of the dollar then gold would be going up and it’s not. So it looks like a bubble.”
The host then pressed on the restriction on “printing” of the virtual money and its reproduction Rickards’ responded that it, “is capped to some level but we’re not there yet. Where does bitcoin come from? Yes, bitcoin can be purchased on a secondary market. But they are created by “miners” which is a bit of a misnomer. They’re basically people with a lot of computing power and developing expertise that solve very hard math problems and give a bitcoin as a reward. When bitcoin reaches levels similar to today, two or three thousand dollars, that is a pretty big incentive.”
“While the cost of [digital] “mining” is not zero, but it is pretty low relatively to the cost. To me it looks a bit more like the Fed. How much does it cost the Fed to create a dollar? The answer is zero. It doesn’t cost them anything to create a dollar.”
“What does it cost to create bitcoin? Sure, you have some investment in computing but it is nowhere near the market price. [So that’s why] it looks a bit like the Fed where you keep cranking them out, they are money, and when you buy bitcoin for dollars you are just swapping money.”
- Source, The Daily Reckoning
