Former President Donald Trump and Ken Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund investor, have both condemned digital currencies as a threat for the U.S. Dollar.
Griffin, who is the founder of Citadel LLC’s $38 billion hedge fund, said to the Economic Club of Chicago that t crypto was “a jihadist call and that we don’t believe in dollars.” He was dismayed at the work of the younger generation on crypto alternatives.
“What an amazing concept, that we as a nation embrace so many bright, talented, and young people to find a replacement currency for our reserve currency.
He said, “I wish all the passion and energy that went into crypto was directed toward making America stronger.”
Griffin, however, doesn’t seem to be opposed to making crypto money in the future. Citadel has not yet taken the plunge into crypto by traditional financial institutions and hedge funds, he said. This is due to the “lackof regulatory certainty.”
The hedge fund manager said that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler was “spot on” in his comments from August, when he said that if crypto is going to achieve its potential it “needs to come within public policy frameworks.”
“Doing so will make it a smaller market, because it’ll become a far more competitive market when there’s regulatory clarity,” Griffin said. “And that will be good. A small market, less people involved who are frankly just trying to make a quick buck.”
Meanwhile former US President Donald Trump warned against the threat to the dollar from China’s digital yuan.
During an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Adam Shapiro on Oct. 5, Trump provided his take on China, the U.S. economy and the crypto sector.
Speaking on the Chinese government’s moves to ban crypto in the country led by Xi Jinping, Trump said the clampdown was a part of Jinping’s moves to squash competition as he works on “his own currency, whether it’s crypto or otherwise,” and suggested that the U.S. government should do the same:
“I’m a big fan of our currency and I don’t want to have other currencies coming out and hurting or demeaning the dollar in any way.”
“If you look at a monetary system based on the dollar, if you start losing credibility, all of a sudden you’re going to lose that strong monetary system,” Trump said. The controversial former president said the U.S. government’s “horror show” with the Mexican border and pull back from Afghanistan had also affected the credibility of the greenback.
Trump is not a fan of cryptocurrency. He stated in late August that crypto was “potentially an impending disaster” and questioned whether digital assets could be fake.
They [cryptocurrencies] could be fake. They may be fake. They are definitely something people don’t know much about.
