Crypto investors have taken a beating over the past month. Bitcoin is down 20 percent this week, LUNA crashed, and Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank, says crypto is “worth nothing.”
“I have said all along the crypto assets are highly speculative, very risky assets,” Lagarde said in an interview on Sunday. “My very humble assessment is that it is worth nothing. It is based on nothing. There is no underlying assets to act as an anchor of safety.”
Lagarde admitted she has never partaken in the blockchain, yet her son has but with no return.
Although Lagarde doesn’t believe in cryptocurrency, she does believe in a digital euro.
“The day when we have the central bank digital currency, any digital euro, I will guarantee it. So the central bank will be behind it. I think that is vastly different from any of those things.”
Lagarde also indicated the ECB would increase interest rates this summer to fight against inflation.
“We are going to follow the path of stopping net purchases and then sometime after that, which could be a few weeks, hike interest rates,” she said.
She couldn’t verify if the increase would be a 50 basis-point hike but correlated the situation to a car in motion. Stating the bank doesn’t want to hit the breaks because the goal is to “lift the accelerator to slow inflation.”
