Former Goldman Sachs fund manager and current Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal says he’s witnessing an unprecedented crush of institutional money buying Bitcoin.
In a new interview with CT’s Giovanni Pigni, Pal says BTC’s return to near $20,000 levels is just the beginning.
“From what I know, and I know a lot of people in the industry, they are all onboarding institutional clients, family offices, endowments, at an enormous pace. But $20,000 here is not the same as $20,000 back then [in 2017]. Back then it had gone up 100 fold when it got up to $20,000, we haven’t even started this yet.
Later on, when things get speculative, we will see something similar potentially play out. But the difference is, where these guys are getting it wrong, is they’re saying, ‘People aren’t as interested.’ Ya, but the real money is interested and that’s a game changer.”
Pal says Bitcoin is one of the most unique trades he’s ever seen, and the top cryptocurrency will likely benefit in the months ahead regardless of which direction the global economy takes.
“Regardless of what’s going on, that money is coming. Let’s look at the reasons. I have a feeling the vaccine takes until Q3 next year before it’s really rolled out. We look at the European economy, it is falling fast. I don’t know how they’re going to deal with Christmas and the New Year. The US economy has got the same problems. I think it goes into lockdown in January and February once the Biden administration comes in because the virus over Thanksgiving, New Year, and Christmas is going to grow substantially. I think we’ve got problems in India after Divali, where you’ve got hundreds of millions of people together celebrating and I think we’re going to get a big second wave in India.
So we’ve got problems. The vaccine takes time to [roll] out. Event the Pfizer vaccine needs to be at -77 degrees. There’s impossible logistics to get it out fast enough. So this is not an instant fix. There’s not enough doses for everybody. There’s going to be a geopolitical fight over who gets what.
So I think we can write off until the summer, basically. So the economy is weak. So in that scenario, considering we didn’t in the US get a stimulus package and Europe’s been slow to get a stimulus package, the central banks step in first and eventually they pass some stimulus, but it won’t be enough. If I’m right and the economy is worse than expected, we’ll get a much bigger stimulus package and the central banks will underwrite that too. Then after that, we have me being wrong.
Me being wrong is the vaccine gets rolled out in one quarter and we’ve had more stimulus and the central banks keep stimulating. They’ve all got inflation targets that they want to overshoot and we get inflation. Well, Bitcoin’s going to do well in that too. So we’ve got both scenarios almost, I’ve literally never seen a setup like this, where you have almost both scenarios playing out that it doesn’t matter whether you get the macro call right or not because both amount to the same thing and that’s really interesting.”
Pal is updating his prediction for the current Bitcoin cycle. He says $150,000 is likely on the low-end, but he believes PlanB’s controversial estimates in the upper $250,000 range may end up being too conservative.
“If I was to be conservative, I’d say $150,000. If I’m to be realistic knowing what I know about the flow of funds, I have a feeling that PlanB’s model is going to underprice the upside. I know everybody thinks on this cycle the price will be lower. I just don’t see it because of the amount of money coming into the space. I actually have a feeling it might be above his target of about $250,000 but I don’t know. But I like that optionality. Worst case $150,000, best case north of $250,000. I mean, find me another trade in the world that looks like this.”
Pal, who is a longtime crypto investor, says he can afford to take a big risk on Bitcoin and now has about 75% of his liquid net worth in BTC.
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