Kim Dotcom, founder of the now-defunct file-hosting website Megaupload, is seeing a bounce on Twitter engagement after telling his 736,000 followers to buy crypto and gold.
The crypto tweet streak supports a move into Bitcoin, crypto and gold and away from the US dollar. Kim Dotcom proclaims that a big crash in the US economy is 100% certain.
He outlines his take on how fintech forces will both generate an unprecedented shift in the world economy and shift the balance of power from governments to citizens.
Although Dotcom is a controversial figure who is fighting extradition to the US from New Zealand on charges of fraud, and has been accused of criminal copyright infringement and money laundering by the US Justice Department due to his file-hosting internet activities, his conclusions about the US economy are shared.
According to a recent survey by the National Association for Business Economics, 82% of the economists surveyed predict a recession in the US will start after 2019.
[the_ad id="42537"] [the_ad id="42536"]Desmond Lachman, a macro-economist at the IMF and on Wall Street, writes in a February 2018 op-ed for U.S. News & World Report,
“All the ingredients are in place for a catastrophic economic and financial market crisis.”
“A key ingredient for a global economic crisis is asset price bubbles and credit risk mispricing. On that score, today’s financial market situation would appear to be very much more concerning than that on the eve of the September 2008 Lehman-bankruptcy. Whereas then, asset price bubbles were largely confined to the U.S. housing and credit markets, today, asset price bubbles are more pervasive being all too much in evidence around the globe.”
In a report by Salon on August 12, US economist and financial broker-dealer Peter Schiff details why he thinks an economic collapse is likely, and why he believes “We’re going to continue what we began in 2008.” First and foremost, the bailout measures in 2008 were a band-aid that didn’t address any of the underlying problems.
According to Peter Schiff,
“I think the attention is going to focus back to the US again. I think the U.S. is in worse shape than Europe. I think we’re in worse shape than Japan, not that Europe and Japan are not in trouble, they are. But I just think we’re in more trouble.”
“There are a lot of bubbles. The bond market is a bubble. The stock market, housing market, the whole U.S. economy, really, is one gigantic bubble.”
“We’re going to have to deal with a decline in the stock market, the bond market. We’re going to have to deal with a lot of defaults, [and] a lot of debtors are going to go broke. It’s going to be a painful process even if we bring it on ourselves. But if we wait for the crisis to happen on its own because it’s imposed on us by the world, it’s just going to be worse.”
He believes the Fed’s standard solution of quantitative easing, a mechanism for “printing money”, will produce more pain for the US dollar.
Despite the impending fiat doom outlined by Schiff and Dotcom, Schiff is a Bitcoin critic while Dotcom is a supporter. Schiff’s solutions to the economic woes are to slash government spending and allow the Fed to find a real, much higher level for interest rates – and then deal with the fallout of bankruptcies.
Dotcom’s remedy is to move away from government-backed fiat and to build up the emerging digital economy of borderless cryptocurrencies.