Wow- Bitcoin is below $70k
Any thoughts on what’s driving it?
Personally, I’ve never been a fan. Still haven’t seen a use-case for it.
My WAGs -
It started a significant drop in November, about the same time silver really took off. I’m thinking that was speculators moving from BitCoin to silver as their hot thing to not miss out on.
Both having had their upsides partly underpinned by arguments for dollar alternatives other than gold and other currencies. Bitcoin’s case as a major player in that basket losing steam.
Then the Warsh announcement: silver, gold, and Bitcoin all tumble with the news as the markets think he might not be crazy.
I think Dr. Krugman captures my thoughts about it pretty well (and he’s a much better writer).
From there:
… the past few months we’ve been experiencing a lot of turmoil and uncertainty, leading to widespread talk about a “debasement trade” in which investors doubt whether dollars are still the safe haven they used to be. And the verdict so far is that the future replacement for gold is … gold. Investors have piled into the yellow stuff even while dumping Bitcoin, which is acting like a speculative tech stock rather than a safe haven.
So the gold standard debasement trade is … gold?
I would love to believe that crypto is down for real this time. I suspect though that it is down but not out. Huge runs up probably not again but I don’t think it will completely crater.
I’ll bet on crypto dying off the same as Tesla.
I.e. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to see strong price growth for the next decade, regardless of all logic.
Unlike Tesla, crypto has a real world mission of being a store of value and medium of exchange for all sorts of organized crime and official corruption.
And both of those industries are booming worldwide.
I’m not sure it has a mission, as such. Not sure why it was created at all, frankly. It may have been an attempt at a transparent medium of exchange independent of national organizations, but if so that was naiive and long in the past. It has always been a pure speculation play.
It has no economic basis. One can argue that neither does the dollar: but that has a secret weapon: the IRS. Which can tax personal and corporate real assets to support it.
The debasement is of the dollar. The current safe haven is gold; the cryptobros want it to be bitcoin, but Krugman doesn’t think that it is changing. Not his clearest prose, but I find his free Substack to be worthwhile reading most days.
Crypto has dropped by half like 4-5 times since I’ve been aware of it. I have no opinion on whether or not this time is different.
I didn’t mean a mission in the sense of “The designer created it for that specific purpose.”
But many things get built for half-understood reasons and only later does somebody find a use for this thing that it’s actually good at.
The forces of crime have found crypto to be real handy. They’ll keep using it until something better is invented or somehow crypto becomes policed enough they have to abandon it and go back to shipping containers full of currency.
Whether anyone else will keep using it is a separate question.
I understand what he wrote. And yes it is that gold has been the historic approach as a dollar debasement trade. And it maintains its position.
The … joke son … is that … Ach. Not worth explaining.
Entirely understood. It may have originated as a sort of ‘open source’ idea to create a medium of exchange not controlled by any one country, organization or system. But if so it has completely failed since it has become a vehicle for speculation, rather than a stable currency.
The best laid plans, and all that….
And up about 10% today. I credit all the news attention to how much it has lost. Not a real rebound nor dead cat bounce.
S&P was up not quite 2% on the day. So an outperform by TS, but not against the grain.
… Or those damn tokens that were all in the news a couple of years ago…
After many years of calling me every month, I’ve finally agreed to a free meeting with an investment advisor at Fidelity. Any advice on questions I should ask?
My main questions, and why I agreed to meet, is to get some guidance on safe foreign investments. I’d really like to have a large percentage of my money parked in non-USD, non-gold, non-crypto assets.
Personally I’d feel a bit wary if the ‘sell’ is as hard as that.
Immediate question: how much is this advice going to cost you? Is it a leader to try to lock you in to an ongoing charge? I have the impression that Fidelity is a fairly reputable organization, but they’re not a charity.
As for specific technical questions, those are really going to depend on your personal circumstances.
My company’s 401(k) is managed by Fidelity and I had a meeting with them a couple of years ago. Note that their usual guideline is that you should “aim to save at least 1x your salary by 30, 3x by 40, 6x by 50, 8x by 60, and 10x by 67.” They will ask you about how much you have saved outside of your company account and will give you an analysis of how long your retirement savings will last, depending on whether the market is average, below average or significantly below average.
I finally succumbed to a meeting with a Fidelity Advisor last summer for a similar purpose.
I moved a lot of my retirement funds to foreign stock and/or bond index funds and they have done very well (so have most of my remaining US index funds, though).
I’ve been with Fidelity for about 30 years and overall they have been great. BUT: I just got off the phone with them trying to do a couple of RMDs, and their Customer Service has been significantly enshittified. They have hidden their phone numbers way down in the menus and want you to do everything by chatbot or on line. Except they don’t offer the options I needed on line and the chatbot just referred me to the on line instructions. It took over 1/2 hour to finally reach three different representatives and complete what in the past was a pretty mundane transaction. I am not happy with the new process.
Short answer: If the Advisor doesn’t cost you anything, set up a meeting with him/her and get them to do the transfers for you. If you are interested, I can PM you the name of the Advisor I used, though I’m not sure whether you can request a particular person.
My intrinsic cheapness gives me a very high saving throw versus sales pitches. I expect some selling to happen, but if it’s a timeshare level hard sell, it will be annoying, but is extremely unlikely to be successful. It is possible they’ll try to sell me something that is actually interesting, but I’m not sure what that could be. Any pitch for a high expense crystal ball based fund is a quick way to get my money to Vanguard.
I’m expecting the biggest sales pitch will be for me to move more money into Fidelity. They already have everything that isn’t in my 403b, so that’s a dead end for them.
The main thing I want out of it is some guidance on sorting through the many, many possible funds I can put my money.
My personal circumstances are that I used to benefit from holding the majority of my investments in the world’s reserve currency, but that currency is falling out of favor due to some unfortunate recent events. At 10 or so years from retirement I’m all of the sudden very concerned about inflation and currency devaluation wiping out my retirement savings.
All I know is every time I log into my TIAA account it asks my “can you retire on $XXXX per month?” The answer is yes, so then I stop worrying.
Thank you for the summary of your visit. I haven’t needed to use Fidelity customer service for anything in quite some time, so it’s too bad to hear it’s gone downhill.
I have a “personal” advisor in my local Fidelity office. All I know is he (always been a “he”) will call every month, then I’ll tell him to not bother me, and then he’ll stop calling me until someone new takes over the job, and he’ll start calling me (“I’m your new advisor at the local office”).