Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, spoke at the BIS summit on Tuesday. She maintained that crypto constituted a threat, and that Russian rubles were circumventing sanctions by going into crypto and stablecoins.
Despite most officials stating that there is little evidence to support the view that crypto is being used to avoid sanctions by Russia, Christine Lagarde is using the possibility to continue to malign cryptocurrency – something she has always done at every opportunity thus far.
Her comments that Russian rubles going into crypto are on the rise may well be true, but the liquidity on exchanges and in such tools as ‘mixers’, for a meaningful amount of value to pass through them, just isn’t there.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren recently tried in a similar way to suggest that cryptocurrencies were being used by Russia. Her embarrassing grilling of a Chainalysis expert only served to highlight her complete ignorance of the subject.
Even Michael Mosier, a deputy director at the US enforcement agency FinCEN, said that the crypto market was too small for a country the size of Russia to make widespread use of it. He stated:
“You can’t flip a switch overnight, and run a G-20 economy on cryptocurrency,”
He added:
“It’s an access problem, it’s a rails problem, and it’s just a basic liquidity problem. Certainly, there’s going to be an element [of crypto] that’s part of their playbook. But it frankly isn’t at the top of the list.”
Lagarde appears to be undeterred by facts. She chooses to ignore the fact that cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain, and that the technology provides total transparency of all transactions, thereby providing a path to the door of any criminals who are stupid enough to use it. She continued the crypto/criminality narrative by saying yesterday:
“So is it a threat? Yes. Has it … been a threat in the past? Yes, because when you look at a lot of the dubious transactions that are taking place, a lot of the criminal activities payments that are taking place, very often you find some crypto assets,”
Instead, Lagarde would have the whole of Europe adopt a central bank digital currency (CBDC). This is currently what China is attempting to inflict on its citizens, because CBDCs will give the central bank the power to completely control the spending of every single citizen, leading to total and utter control over their daily lives.
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