Cathie Wood: Low rates and quantitative easing drive interest in Bitcoin
Cathie Wood, the well-known U.S. investor and founder of Ark Investment Management, said today that Bitcoin is in its “early days” given its diverse use cases.
However, Wood emphasised Bitcoin’s potential as a hedge in a global economy of low rates and quantitative easing.
“The dollar is down which is normally a positive cue for gold, but gold is down at the same time, Bitcoin is up,” Wood said during a panel at today’s Bloomberg Crypto Summit.
During the summit she discussed the future possibility of a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund being approved in the US, which largely hinges on whether Gary Gensler is confirmed as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wood has been a historic backer of bitcoin. Last year, appearing in an investment seminar arranged by Barron’s, she told the audience that the huge increase in the price of Bitcoin was only the beginning.
If institutional investors allocated small percentages of Bitcoin it could take the price range of a bitcoin up to $500,000, she said. One Bitcoin is currently worth just below $50,000.
The price of Bitcoin slid by 12.57 per cent on Tuesday, breaking a record run, after US treasury secretary Janet Yellen warned that the “highly speculative” unit could be used for “illicit” purposes and was “an extremely inefficient way of conduction transactions”.