The economist and famous critic of cryptocurrencies Nouriel Roubini has affirmed that crypto “as a technology has absolutely no basis for success”. Roubini presented his new arguments against the cipher in an interview with the CFA Institute on March 6.
In a conversation with the global association of professional investors, Roubini, an economist based in New York who, as is known, predicted the financial crisis of 2008, has reiterated once again his negative attitude towards cryptospace and the block chain.
The prominent economist said that all crypto-industry consists of assets that are neither money nor currency. He stressed that cryptocurrencies are not stable in terms of providing a storage of value, nor a means of scalable payment.
As an example of crypto defects, Roubini pointed to the extreme bull market during the second half of 2017, arguing that “millions of people” were buying crypto for fear of losing it (FOMO), but they “did not know anything about finance or portfolio investments. ”
According to Roubini, the performance of the crypto represents an “exponential parabolic bubble” that has started to explode because there is no real fundamental value that supports it as an asset.
In addition to reiterating his negative position on crypto, Roubini also argued that the blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies, has “nothing to do” with the future of financial services.
Roubini has excluded blockchain technology from the list of leading technologies that will lead to a revolution in manufacturing or information technology, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, and the Internet of Things. Roubini once again asserted that the “real revolution in financial services is fintech, but fintech has nothing to do with crypto”.
He elaborated:
“Fintech will be a combination of artificial intelligence and big data and the omnipresent Internet, it will revolutionize payment systems, credit allocation, capital market functions, insurance, investment management, financial advice, etc. ”
Earlier this year, Roubini said the blockchain “is not better than an Excel spreadsheet” and is the “most overrated technology in history.”
Recently, the chairman of the Commission on Commodity Futures Trading in the United States said that, if it had been used at that time, the chain of blocks would have transformed the real-time responses of regulators to the 2008 global financial crisis. .
In early March, the consulting services company International Data Corporation published a report stating that spending on the block chain will grow by almost 89 percent in 2019, and investments in the block chain are expected reach USD 2,900 million in 2019, and USD 12,400 million in 2022. According to the same study, the financial sector will be the leading industry in terms of investment in blockchain technology, with a total expected expenditure of more than USD 1,100 million .