According to economist and prominent Bitcoin critic Nouriel Roubini, the US Securities and Exchange Commission should “look to people like Tesla CEO Elon Musk to manipulate the market after the electric car maker’s recent decision to include Bitcoin on its balance sheet “.
Musk has tweeted about Bitcoin and Dogecoin for the past few weeks and at some point updated the biography of his popular Twitter profile to “#bitcoin”. Tesla filed its annual 10-K report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, claiming it bought $ 1.5 billion (BTC, -5.76%) of bitcoin in January.
The New York University economics professor similarly criticized the “irresponsible behavior” of Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, for converting a significant portion of the business intelligence company’s cash reserves into bitcoin in the face of cryptocurrency volatility. MicroStrategy currently holds 71,079 BTC, according to an SEC filing last week.
In an interview with CoinDesk TV’s First Mover, Roubini warned that Bitcoin could “collapse” if Tether, the issuer of the Tether (USDT) stablecoin, and the crypto exchange Bitfinex are indicted earlier this year. Tether (USDT, -0.06%) has a staggering market capitalization of $ 31 billion and is widely investigated, including by the US Department of Justice and the New York Attorney General. At the center of the DOJ’s criminal investigation against Tether as an organization is the question of whether or not USDT is being used to inflate the cryptocurrency markets.
Bitfinex claimed last Friday that it had repaid the balance of a $ 550 million loan to its sister company, Tether. In 2018, the exchange borrowed over $ 600 million from Tether with which it shares executives and owners. The transaction was made public in April 2019 after the New York Attorney General alleged Bitfinex transferred $ 850 million in client and corporate funds to payment processor Crypto Capital Corp. lost and used funds from Tether’s reserve to secretly cover the shortfall.
Roubini predicts that at some point the world will “run out of cash” and the US will create an “e-dollar”. Central bank digital currencies will allow central bankers to quickly maneuver monetary policy and normalize negative interest rates in times of economic crisis.
See the full interview with Dr. Roubini at the top.
