Joseph Stiglitz is the George Costanza of economists: Every instinct he has, do the opposite.
f you’re looking for another reason to take the plunge and finally buy some bitcoin, check out Nobel Prize-Winning economist Joseph Stigltiz’s new interview with Bloomberg, in which he says it should “be outlawed” and warns that the government “could crack down at any moment and then [bitcoin] collapses.”
Stiglitz is the George Costanza of economists: Every instinct he has, do the opposite. In 2002, he coauthored an infamous paper concluding that “the risk to the government from a potential default on [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] debt is effectively zero.” And it’s almost a decade to the month since he was in Caracas praising Hugo Chavez’s economic policies.
Bloomberg TelevisionSpeaking of Venezuela, Stiglitz also told Bloomberg that bitcoin “doesn’t serve any socially useful function.” While it’s true that cryptocurrency’s world-altering potential won’t be fully realized until the technology advances quite a bit, it’s already enabling the citizens of that country ravaged by socialism to obtain life-saving food and medicine.
Is it that Stiglitz is an advocate of expansive government power in all contexts (he’s also urging the U.S. to outlaw cash), or is it that he’s too arrogant to bother trying to understand the most successful free-market money system running on the internet? I say both. (Fellow Nobel Laureate Paul The-Internet-Will-Be-About-as-Useful-as-the-Fax-Machine Krugman is also a bitcoin skeptic.)
One of the great pleasures of observing bitcoin’s rapid rise in price and prominence is that it’s sending elite economists into fits of confusion and stoking their insecurity. (“We ought to just go back to what we always have had,” Stiglitz told Bloomberg.)
Source/More: Bitcoin Sends Elite Economists Into Glorious Fits of Confusion – Hit & Run : Reason.com
