Billionaire Ken Griffin slams crypto as ‘jihadist call’ against the greenback

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin and former U.S. President Donald Trump have both slammed digital currencies as a threat to the U.S. dollar.

Griffin, the founder of the $38 billion hedge fund Citadel LLC, told the Economic Club of Chicago on Oct. 4, that crypto is “a jihadist call that we don’t believe in the dollar.”  He expressed his dismay over the younger generation working on dollar alternatives in the crypto sector:

“What a crazy concept this is, that we as a country embrace so many bright, young, talented people to come up with a replacement for our reserve currency.”

“I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed towards making the United States stronger,” he added.

Griffin however doesn’t not seem opposed to making money out of crypto in the future. He said that Citadel is yet to follow the plunge of other hedge funds and traditional financial institutions into crypto because of the “lack of regulatory certainty.”

The hedge fund manager said that U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler was “spot on” in his comments from August, when he said that if crypto is going to achieve its potential it “needs to come within public policy frameworks.”

“Doing so will make it a smaller market, because it’ll become a far more competitive market when there’s regulatory clarity,” Griffin said. “And that will be good. A small market, less people involved who are frankly just trying to make a quick buck.”

Meanwhile former US President Donald Trump warned against the threat to the dollar from China’s digital yuan.

During an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Adam Shapiro on Oct. 5, Trump provided his take on China, the U.S. economy and the crypto sector.

Speaking on the Chinese government’s moves to ban crypto in the country led by Xi Jinping, Trump said the clampdown was a part of Jinping’s moves to squash competition as he works on “his own currency, whether it’s crypto or otherwise,” and suggested that the U.S. government should do the same:

“I’m a big fan of our currency and I don’t want to have other currencies coming out and hurting or demeaning the dollar in any way.”

“If you look at a monetary system based on the dollar, if you start losing credibility, all of a sudden you’re going to lose that strong monetary system,” Trump said. The controversial former president said the U.S. government’s “horror show” with the Mexican border and pull back from Afghanistan had also affected the credibility of the greenback.

Trump is also no fan of cryptocurrency. In late August, he stated that crypto was “potentially a disaster waiting to happen” as he questioned whether digital assets were “fake”:

“They [cryptocurrencies] may be fake. Who knows what they are? They are certainly something that people don’t know very much about.”