It is indeed necessary to hang up both the heart and the stomach well to pretend to treat and trade such currencies with incredible volatility. They are really just an instrument – yet another – of pure speculation that has no intrinsic value!
As fleeting as a summer love
Buy a property and you will still have it should the market take a downturn. Buy a stock in the stock market and you still own part of the company when the market crashes. Buy bitcoins and you only have to trash your computer if its value would liquefy (as it currently does) because this thing is just a piece of code that you can’t technically do anything and someone else can End of the Pyramid had the bright idea of selling you.
This generalized hysteria actually tells a banal story that has been experienced many times before. It reflects a collective contagion that has historically inflated asset valuations far more tangibly than a cryptocurrency — as ephemeral as a summer love interest — but just as mundane as the musical chairs game, where seats are limited and only those who get it who first sell away with it.
This market, worth a few trillions of dollars and euros less today because it has already depreciated heavily in recent months, is only worth it thanks to other players who agree to keep going higher and further.
Thousands of gullible investors…poor
More seriously – much more worrying and also sadder: Crypto thrived on a breeding ground of young and vulnerable speculators and investors who could not afford to invest in the stock market or real estate that was too expensive for them. Let’s be realistic and honest: in an environment where the new generations are much worse off than their older ones, in an environment where it seems so easy to win through speculation thanks to the total deregulation and liberalization of capital flows, cryptocurrency has Dreams sold to young people who found in it an ideal way to stand out from the elders. In a world where inequalities have strayed, where the vast majority of young people around the world are now the new poor, crypto was the only weapon available to this caste of untouchables to make their mark, those with of the time that they would follow in the footsteps of the rich and powerful, with an avant-garde instrument by the way.
Unfortunately for these young people and for these poor people for whom crypto was literally an ideology as they only swore by it, the rich investors got richer because they alone were at the forefront of these platforms and this bogus market. Today, thousands of gullible investors – young and old, but poor – are suffering head-on, even to their last penny, at this latest avatar of a savage capitalism that can neither know nor thrive except on the corpses of the weakest. Again and again, those who can least afford to lose are harmed and ruined.
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Michel Santi is a macroeconomist, specialist in financial markets and central banks. He is the founder and managing director of Art Trading & Finance.
He has just published “Armchair 37” with the foreword by Edgar Morin. He is also the author of a new book, The Testament of a Disillusioned Economist. His Facebook page and feedTwitter
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