Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini earned the nickname “Dr Doom” the honest way — by forecasting the 2008 financial crisis while the rest of the room was still ordering champagne. So when he sat before the US Senate Banking Committee on 11 October 2018 to deliver his verdict on cryptocurrency, the senators were not getting a crank. They were getting a man with a track record in catastrophe.

He did not ration the contempt. “Crypto is the mother or father of all scams and bubbles,” he told the committee, and the written testimony he filed alongside it carried titles like “The Great Crypto Heist” and a companion essay he called “The Big Blockchain Lie.” This was not a man hedging toward “but the technology is promising.” He thought the technology was the con. Bitcoin was trading near US$6,300 that day, deep in the long winter that followed the 2017 mania, and to Roubini the slide only confirmed the diagnosis: a bubble does what bubbles do.

His case was the macroeconomist's case, and it was a serious one. Crypto, he argued, solved no problem that existing money did not solve better; it was slow, energy-hungry, riddled with fraud, and propped up by manipulation and the eternal hope of a greater fool. The Bureau records the argument as filed, because it was argued by someone qualified to argue it, and large parts of it have aged perfectly well.

And yet. The number at the top of this page is what Bitcoin did in the years after Dr Doom told the Senate it was the mother of all scams. It is a fact about the asset, not a refutation of his economics — a scam and a rising price are not, regrettably, mutually exclusive, and Roubini would be the first to tell you the reckoning he forecast is merely running late. The Bureau files the testimony beside the count and leaves the jury out.