The misgivings of Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, about the use of cryptocurrencies come from afar. Already during her time at the head of the IMF she compared them to Dutch tulips and the dotcom bubble. And during the time she has been in Frankfurt she has not changed her position at any time. “Fake money,” she called it. What was unknown until now is that she had the enemy at home. According to the agency Reuters, in a talk with students in the German city, revealed that one of his sons decided to dedicate part of his money to speculating by buying cryptocurrencies, despite the insistence with which his mother warned him of the risks. “She completely ignored me, which is her right,” she said. “And he lost almost everything she had invested,” she said.
The Frenchwoman has not specified which of her two sons (both in their thirties) was the one who fell into the temptation of expanding their checking account with digital currencies, nor which cryptocurrency was chosen (bitcoin and ethereum are the most popular). She has not put numbers to the amount invested either, and limited herself to pointing out that it was not a very high figure. She did explain, however, that the percentage of losses was around 60%. That is, if she had invested 10,000 euros, she would have lost 6,000. Finally, her son gave in in the domestic argument with her mother. “When I spoke to him again about the issue, he reluctantly agreed that I was right,” Lagarde added.
So far this year, bitcoin has risen around 127%, and the second largest, ethereum, has appreciated 83%, so the operations of Lagarde’s son must have occurred in 2022, when bitcoin It lost precisely around 60% of its value. It is also unknown whether the investment was in bitcoins or other smaller, and therefore more volatile, currencies, as it is easier to move their price without the need for large investments.
In her speech, Lagarde, perhaps with the intention of dissuading those of her listeners who were thinking of using part of their savings to buy cryptocurrencies in the future, openly expressed her position, already known, on this type of asset. , very popular among a section of youth. “As you can see, I have a very low opinion of cryptocurrencies,” she said. “People are free to invest their money wherever they want, they are free to speculate as much as they want, but people should not be free to participate in criminally sanctioned operations and businesses,” he said in reference to the use of cryptocurrencies by criminals and terrorists. because it is easier to launder and reach organized gangs than traditional money, by bypassing the banking channel, thus allowing criminals to be financed.
Defenders of cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, estimate that institutions such as the European Central Bank are against the spread of this type of currency because they would lose the monopoly on the issuance of money. The ECB, in fact, is preparing its own version of electronic money, a digital euro that would serve to stand up to cryptocurrencies, considered a threat to its sovereignty. In October, a first phase of research closed, which lasted two years, and must go through two more stages that will extend preparations until at least 2026.
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