As covered by CCN, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently said that Bitcoin should be outlawed during a Bloomberg TV interview. Just one day later, another Nobel laureate, Robert J. Shiller, shared his view on bitcoin: that he's going to crash into an event similar to the US stock market crash that preceded the Great Depression.
While Joseph Stiglitz believes that cryptocurrency should be outlawed because it "serves no socially useful function" and that its popularity comes from "potential for circumvention, lack of oversight," Robert J. Shiller compared the attraction of bitcoin to the narrative of a "mystery film" that attracts people who want to thwart the system.
Notably, Yale economist Robert J. Shiller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in "Trendspotting in asset markets", in 2013. The economist's popularity is partly Derived from his prediction of the Internet bubble and the real estate bubble, as he published books entitled "Irrational Exuberance" detailing these accidents.
At a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania this week, he declared:
"Bitcoin, it's absolutely exciting (…) You're fast, you're smart, you understand that no one else understands, you're with. And Bitcoin has this anti-government attitude and anti-regulation.It is a wonderful story.If that was only true. "
Shiller added that he does not know where the cryptocurrency is going to stop, but compared it to the stock market in the 1920s. In his words, it's going to go very high but we "will reach a 1929 thereafter." He added that the cryptocurrency will crush but "will not go to zero, it will just come down."
His comments, like those of Joseph Stiglitz, come at a time when bitcoin reached a new record of over $ 11,400, then quickly to $ 9,200 before starting to recover. At the time of going to press, a bitcoin is trading at $ 9,959, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
It is interesting to note that Stiglitz's opinion on bitcoin, or at least on crypto-currencies, seems to have changed, as when he spoke at the Forum's annual meeting world economy in Davos, Switzerland. the use of digital currencies. Shiller, on the other hand, said in 2014 that cryptocurrency is a bubble, an "amazing bubble example."
Despite Shiller's past predictions of dot-coms and housing bubbles, his claims about bitcoin do not seem to be supported by any data at this point. Bearing this in mind, the only thing we can be sure of is that the two Nobel laureates, Shiller and Stiglitz, are not fans of cryptocurrency.
Featured image from Flickr / World Economic Forum.