Crypto Finance Is a Speculative Scam That’s Worsening the Instability of Global Capitalism
Advocates of crypto claimed that it would liberate ordinary people from the constraints of big finance and state-backed money. In reality, it’s become a vehicle for high-risk financial speculation, with the same narrow elite harvesting the gains.
A woman holds a banner that reads “No to bitcoin” during a demonstration against the circulation of bitcoin in San Salvador, El Salvador, on September 7, 2021. (Marvin Recinos / AFP via Getty Images)
For its boosters, crypto finance is a modern-day version of the nineteenth-century gold rush, with fortunes to be made. It certainly seems to have attracted as many crooks and charlatans as the original Wild West. Sam Bankman-Fried is currently on trial in one of the biggest fraud cases in US history after the ignominious collapse of FTX.
Yet in spite of the high-profile crash of 2022, which saw the value of crypto finance plunge to a third of its previous level, it looks as if crypto is here to stay — not as a way for ordinary people to escape the constraints of state-backed money, but as a vehicle for financial speculation. The growth of crypto will compound the volatility of global capitalism.
Ramaa Vasudevan is a professor of economics at Colorado State University and the author of Things Fall Apart: From the Crash of 2008 to the Great Slump. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’sLong Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.
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