Lloyd Blankfein – Cryptocurrency Collapse Wont Cause Systemic Crash

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Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., comments on cryptocurrencies during an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of New York. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Lloyd Blankfein Says He's Not Worried About Cryptocurrencies In Systemic Way

Transcript

How does Wall Street change over the next five 10 years. Does does Picco one thing people here have asked about crypto currencies does that become a real issue or not. Are you worried about them. You've put your toe in the water. We're not really in any kind of systemic way the people you know it's you know would be very painful to somebody who put his or her entire net worth into crypto currencies. But it's not a systemic issue at this point people are passionate for passionate against it. I remember when they came out first with them when they came out with cell phones I remember thinking God Who the hell is going to lug this thing around. And I'm saying and besides a fool. Tim fumbles on every corner. I'm not going to get this is this is a fad. Nobody's going to carry a cell phone. So I just passed on that whole thing turns out to have worked. So now they have crypto currency and know I always thought I can't say why it should work but if it did work I'd be able to explain it in hindsight why it did because it's has been no secret of success. Well you have to look at things from both sides and say if it sometimes in a risky thing I say will this happen. What are the chances of it happened. And sometimes I find it easier to think about something. OK let me postulate this did happen. Tell me why it did.

And I find that it's sometimes an easier way of seeing and I look at the evolution of money and I say you know you start out with gold as money and people only take hard currency and make gold coins and gold coins like five dollars and had five dollars gold. And eventually they would give you a piece of paper with the promise that that was five dollars in gold to back the five dollars piece of paper and you can go when you redeem it. Then they gave you a piece of paper and said there's five dollars of gold but you can't redeem it. And at some point they give you paper and says it's worth five dollars. We're not going to redeem it. We don't even have the five dollars even if you wanted to. And we're still doing that today and I see that morphing. And I'm saying that if you go through that morphing if you go through that fiat currency where they say this is worth what it's worth because the government says it is. Why couldn't you have a consensus currency. And so it's not from me. I don't do it. I don't know bitcoin. Goldman Sachs as far as I know us nobody told me has no bitcoin. But if it does work out I could give you the historical pathway that could happen have happened. And so I'm not in the school of saying Gee because it's uncomfortable for me because it's unfamiliar. This can happen that's to arrogance.

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