Nobel laureate Ben Bernanke criticizes crypto-currencies and says tokens “have not been shown to have any economic value”

In an interview with Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers, Bernanke noted that crypto-currencies have not been proven to have any economic value.

Ben Bernanke criticizes crypto-currencies

The demise of some crypto-currency companies like FTX, which was one of the largest crypto-currency exchanges, but also crypto-lenders like Celsius and Blockfi, has caused analysts to re-evaluate the real contribution of crypto-currencies in the economy.

Ben Bernanke, one of the most renowned economists and co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on banking and financial crises, recently shared his opinion on crypto-currencies following the current situation the market is experiencing.

In an interview published on by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter on December 7, Bernanke said he did not think crypto-currencies posed a threat to the current financial system, as no bank is sitting on a large pile of these assets. He stated:

I think so far it has not been shown that crypto-currencies have any economic value.

Ben Bernanke’s negative view of crypto is nothing new, as he has also made similar remarks in the past. In May, Ben Bernanke stated that bitcoin was used “primarily for underground economy activities and often for things that are illegal or illicit“. He also explained that if bitcoin is used as a speculative asset, he does not think it can achieve the status of an alternative currency.

Regulation won’t help

While several experts have called for regulation on the crypto-currency front to allow more citizens to access crypto-currencies in the mainstream, Ben Bernanke says that regulated or not, crypto-currencies are doomed to fail.

In this regard, he explained:

Either they are unregulated and they will collapse because people distrust them, or they are regulated and they will collapse because they are mostly used for criminal activity.

However, in the past, Ben Bernanke was more open to the idea of bitcoin and other crypto-currencies becoming a threat to traditional fiat currencies. In 2017, Ben Bernanke stated that if bitcoin was close to having a transaction equal to that of traditional currencies, regulations would be issued to stop it. At the time, he remarked:

Governments will eventually take whatever steps are necessary to stop it.