Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham is best known for calling the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the housing market collapse before the 2008 global financial crisis. The GMO co-founder and chief
Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham is best known for calling the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the housing market collapse before the 2008 global financial crisis.
The GMO co-founder and chief investment strategist built his reputation by identifying speculative asset bubbles as they were unfolding.
The Wall Street veteran avoided investing in Japanese equities and real estate in the late 1980s during the peak of the Japanese asset price bubble, avoided technology stocks during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, and limited his exposure to the housing bubble before the 2008 financial crisis.
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Crypto is a "useless, speculative asset" that will crash to "zero" over decades, Grantham made the shocking prediction during a CNBC interview on June 26.
In fact, Bitcoin will "dwindle away... not with a bang, but a whimper," he argued. Bitcoin isn't a stable form of value and recently crashed to half of its record price in a strong economy, he added and compared it to unfavorably to gold which has performed well comparatively.
While Bitcoin's price has crashed 45% in a year, gold's price has surged 20% during the same period.
An asset as volatile as crypto can't offer long-term stability, he remarked.
Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO LLC, during an interview in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., on Aug. 17, 2023. Getty Images
The billionaire also pointed to its negligible use case, saying nobody uses it to pay at restaurants and it is only looked at as an speculative asset. Worse, it is being used to facilitate illicit transactions, he decried but clarified that his criticism doesn't extend to the blockchain technology underlying cryptocurrencies.
Grantham hasn't criticized crypto and Bitcoin for the first time. For instance, he once slammed Bitcoin in a podcast published in March 2024 and said it only creates value for "bad guys" like drug dealers who want to stay off radar. He said he is very suspicious of Bitcoin and expressed surprised at countries not banning it.
BTC/USD, Source: DecibelBitcoin was exchanging hands at $58,319 at the time of writing, as per Decibel.
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