Macro guru Raoul Pal says institutions are eager to get access to the crypto markets but still face significant hurdles.
In an interview with Scott Melker on the Wolf of All Streets podcast, Pal says the average person doesn’t understand how much time it takes for institutional investment firms to allocate capital to crypto.
The former Goldman Sachs executive also says institutions struggle with fitting crypto into their administrative systems that are built for traditional financial products.
“They’re all over this, everybody is… [but] it takes a while. People don’t understand that for institutions to go, ‘Oh well, we’re going to buy Bitcoin.’ Okay, how do you mark-to-market it? What is the open? What is the close? Which price do you take? There’s no singular exchange. Then how do you custody it? How do you account for it? All of this stuff takes months of work.”
Pal notes that Generally Accepted Accounting Rules (GAAP) – the standard collection of rules and standards for financial reporting – aren’t exactly conducive to crypto investments for corporations.
“It just takes time. There’s a lot of people to get across the line and you need to appease a lot of people. For the corporations, it’s how you account for it in GAAP accounting. This is the big problem is you can only mark it down, you can’t mark it up, and it has volatility in your quarterly earnings. So only people like Michael Saylor will accept it, others won’t.
That’s why the corporations are slow. They want to do it, I’ve spoken to many but they’re like, ‘These accounting rules, we don’t know what to do.'”
Late last year, Pal predicted that a ‘”tidal wave” institutions would descend upon the crypto markets and cause exponential growth in the industry.