Hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made $20 billion out of predicting the downfall of the US housing market in 2008, has now made the prediction that cryptocurrencies will “go to zero” very soon.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, legendary investor John Paulson trashed crypto, describing it as a “limited supply of nothing”, and recommended gold instead.
Paulson says that the short-term volatility of the digital asset makes it too risky for him to short or place bets against. Instead, he is betting on another alternative asset — gold — as a safe haven.
“I would say that cryptocurrencies are a bubble,” said Paulson. He described crypto as a “limited supply of nothing,” referring to the fixed quantity that some coins have, including,\ bitcoin’s 21 million token cap – though others have no such limit.
“Cryptocurrencies, regardless of where they are trading today, will eventually prove to be worthless. Once the exuberance wears off, or liquidity dries up, they will go to zero. I would not recommend anyone invest in cryptocurrencies,” he added.
Paulson says that this precious metal, gold, tends to perform well during high-inflation periods. “As inflation picks up … the logical place to go is gold,” said Paulson. “But because the amount of money trying to move out of cash and fixed income dwarfs the amount of investable gold, the supply and demand imbalance causes gold to rise.”
Ultimately the price fluctuation has to do more with the relative supply of the coins, Paulson added. “There is no intrinsic value to any of the cryptocurrencies except that there is a limited amount.”
Who is John Alfred Paulson
John Paulson is an American billionaire who leads Paulson & Co., a New York-based investment management firm he founded in 1994. He has been called “one of the most prominent names in high finance” and “a man who made one of the biggest fortunes in Wall Street history.”
His prominence and fortune were made in 2007 when he earned almost $4 billion and was transformed “from an obscure money manager into a financial legend” by using credit default swaps to effectively bet against the US subprime mortgage lending market. In 2010, Paulson earned $4.9 billion. The Forbs real-time tracker estimated his net worth at $4.2 billion as of May 2020.
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