Jamie Dimon talks about bitcoin one day after saying 'I'm not going to talk about bitcoin anymore'
Getty/Win McNamee
Jamie Dimon can't get bitcoin off his mind.
JPMorgan's CEO popped off about bitcoin one day after saying he was done talking about the red-hot digital currency, which Friday morning reached more than $5,800 per coin.
The billionaire banker, who in mid-September called bitcoin "a fraud," said on Friday "who cares about bitcoin" while speaking at a conference in Washington DC.
He also said that governments "are going to crush it one day."
"If you're stupid enough to buy it you're going to pay the price one day," Dimon added.
Dimon, a longtime critic of bitcoin, called it "a terrible store of value" in a 2014 interview with CNBC. While speaking at a Barclays financial conference in September, Dimon bashed bitcoin saying it is in a bubble "worse than tulips bulbs." Dimon added that he would fire anyone at the bank for trading the red-hot cryptocurrency for being stupid.
During JPMorgan's earnings call on Thursday, Dimon said he wouldn't put bitcoin into "the category of important things in the world" and that he wasn't "going to talk about bitcoin anymore."
The massive growth of the cryptocurrency market has recently piqued the interest of folks from Main Street to Wall Street, but Wall Street's top execs — who have seen their fair share of bubbles — have voiced their concern about cryptocurrencies.
Ray Dalio, the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, echoed Dimon's criticisms of bitcoin on September 19. The billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates said bitcoin "is a bubble" during an appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box.
And in a recent interview with Bloomberg News last week, Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, the world's largest investor, said he thinks the explosive growth of bitcoin points to nefarious behavior.
"It just identifies how much money laundering there is being done in the world," Fink said. "How much people are trying to move currencies from one place to another."
Dimon concluded his remarks on bitcoin Friday, saying that it would be the last time he would talk about it "because I really don't care."
Source