Bitcoin
The bitcoin price has added around 350% since it crashed to recent lows of $15,000 per bitcoin in late 2022, largely thanks to Wall Street giant BlackRock which is quietly eyeing a $90 trillion bitcoin bonanza.
Now, with speculation swirling around a "secret sovereign bitcoin bid," JPMorgan's chief executive Jamie Dimon has reversed a previous call for bitcoin to be "closed down" as a huge $1 million bitcoin price prediction is suddenly "brought forward."
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JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon has previously called for bitcoin to be "closed down" but now ... [+]
“I don’t know what the bitcoin itself is for, but I defend your right to smoke a cigarette, I’ll defend your right to buy a bitcoin," Dimon, who has remained staunchly anti-bitcoin and crypto as it has been slowly accepted by the financial establishment, said during the Australian Financial Review Business Summit it was reported by Reuters.
However, he added he "won’t personally ever buy a bitcoin."
In December, Dimon lashed out at bitcoin during a Senate banking committee hearing, telling influential Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren that he's "always been deeply opposed to crypto, bitcoin, etc.," that its "only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers … money laundering, tax avoidance" and if he "was the government, [he'd] close it down."
While Dimon has previously called bitcoin "a hyped-up fraud" and compared it to a "pet rock," he has led his bank in developing its own bitcoin-inspired blockchain called Onyx.
The latest bitcoin price boom, sparked by a fleet of bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) being approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has led the already hyper-bullish Ark Invest chief executive Cathie Wood to bring forward her "$1 million by 2030" bitcoin price prediction.
"Our target is above that and with our new expectations for institutional involvement, the incremental price that we assume for institutions actually has more than doubled," Wood said in an interview with the New Zealand Herald.
"That target was before the SEC gave us the green light, and I think that was a major milestone, and it has pulled forward the timeline," Wood said. "No platform has approved bitcoin yet, so all of this price action has happened before they approve it, and so we haven’t even begun."
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The bitcoin price has rocketed back over the last year, pushing over $70,000 per bitcoin, smashing ... [+]
Meanwhile, Dimon also warned the risk of a U.S. recession is still on "the table," putting the chance of a so-called "soft landing," in which the Federal Reserve draws inflation down without crashing the economy, at "probably 70% to 80%" this year.
"The chance of a soft landing in the next year or two is half that. The worst case would be stagflation," Dimon said, adding the Covid pandemic, supply chain-disrupting lockdowns and huge stimulus measures mean economic indicators need to be taken with "a grain of salt" and the Fed should wait for more clarity before lowering interest rates.
