What Larry Summers thinks about Bitcoin — Fiscal confidence up slightly since January – POLITICO Morning Money – POLITICO.com
Trending February 25, 2014 Comments Off on What Larry Summers thinks about Bitcoin — Fiscal confidence up slightly since January – POLITICO Morning Money – POLITICO.com 17
WHAT LARRY SUMMERS THINKS ABOUT BITCOIN — Morning Money sat down with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers yesterday after he spoke at the National Association for Business Economics policy conference. You can watch the interview — where he addressed a range of issues including the Fed’s tapering strategy; whether Dodd-Frank is working; and if he’d work for another Clinton White House — here. http://politi.co/1k64HUY
We also asked Summers for his thoughts on Bitcoin, and here was his surprisingly optimistic response about the future of the virtual currency (though no mention of the Winklevoss brothers):
“I think Bitcoin has the potential to be a very, very important development. I think that we are seeing many, many sectors of our economy be transformed by information technology and certainly it seems bizarre that at this late date, one has to pay as much as one does to use a debit card or to get cash from an ATM or to transfer money to one’s child living abroad. So it seems to me that there’s going to be a concerted effort to reduce financial frictions and that effort’s going to be multi-faceted and certainly Bitcoin is an innovative approach in that regard. …
“I am very mindful that there have been other things that came out of Silicon Valley that seemed very flakey to people on the outside and then proved to be an enormous deal. Very serious economists thought that the Internet was going to be no more important than the fax machine so I’m not willing to dismiss Bitcoin. At the same time, I do think it’s important to recognize that it can’t and won’t flourish as a way of avoiding legal protections.”
By Kate Davidson and MJ Lee
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