Christine Lagarde – president of the European Central Bank (ECB) said her son lost “almost all” of his investment in crypto despite her repeated warnings not to touch the asset class.
Due to the losses, she claims her son has now “reluctantly accepted” that she was right.
The Lagarde Family’s Crypto Investments
Lagarde discussed her son’s poor crypto journey at a town hall with students in Frankfurt on Friday.
“He ignored me royally, which is his privilege,” she said, according to Reuters. “And he lost almost all the money that he had invested.”
The president has long railed against cryptocurrencies, insisting that Bitcoin is not money, but rather a “highly speculative asset” that is popular among criminals for money laundering.
While open to letting investors buy what they like, she advocates for strong regulations encouraging consumer protection in crypto while mitigating its use in terrorist financing. When it comes to central banks possibly owning Bitcoin, she’s called it “out of the question.”
Yet in May 2022, Lagarde revealed that one of her two sons was diversified into crypto, while still maintaining that crypto assets were “worth nothing” and “based on nothing.” Bitcoin traded for $29,100 at the time, shortly following the collapse of algorithmic stablecoin protocol Terra which tanked crypto markets across the board.
The president has two sons, both of whom are in their mid-30s, though she didn’t reveal which one was the crypto investor.
“It wasn’t a lot but he lost it all, he lost about 60% of it,” she said. “So when I then had another talk with him about it, he reluctantly accepted that I was right.”
European CBDC
In response to concerns that private cryptocurrencies could displace fiat currencies, the ECB began its “preparation phase” for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) last month.
As the name suggests, CBDCs are cryptos that are centrally managed and issued by a country’s central bank and are usually redeemable with its local fiat currency.
Though it will still take at least two years before the ECB decides whether to issue a CBDC, Lagarde remains far more open-minded to the concept than she is to Bitcoin.
“We need to prepare our currency for the future,” she stated regarding the ECB’s CBDC research last month. “It would coexist alongside physical cash, which will always be available, leaving no one behind.”
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