The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has said that the price of Bitcoin (BTC) could increase 10x over the next 5 years but remains uninterested in buying the asset.
Summary
CEO of JPMorgan and Bitcoin: an “uninteresting appreciation”
In an online interview, the CEO of the banking giant JPMorgan has once again made statements about the queen of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, confirming his disinterest in buying BTC but also envisaging a 10x price increase over the next 5 years.
Specifically, Jamie Dimon stated:
“I don’t really care about Bitcoin. I think people waste too much time and breath on it. But it is going to be regulated. […] And that will constrain it to some extent. But whether it eliminates it, I have no idea, and I don’t personally care. I am not a buyer of Bitcoin. That does not mean it can’t go 10 times in price in the next five years”.
Dimon was already talking about Bitcoin in 2017, when at the height of the BTC speculative bubble, he called it a scam and threatened to fire bank employees caught trading crypto.
Only a few months later, he then began to soften his statement by speaking only of disinterest in the asset.
Last May 2021, in another interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dimon confirmed that he did not want to invest personally in BTC, and added that he was forced to offer BTC-related products because his customers were interested in them.
Today, maintaining the same line of thought of detachment from Bitcoin, Dimon actually made a rather significant price prediction.
Calculating that at the time of writing, the current price of BTC is around $42,000, according to Dimon in 5 years time it could be $420,000.
Jamie Dimon prefers to accumulate cash and not Bitcoin
During a conference in June 2021, Dimon said that to protect himself from inflation, his preferred method is to accumulate cash.
This is a different financial strategy than those who choose gold and bitcoin. The CEO of JPMorgan had said that he guides the bank to accumulate cash rather than Treasury bills or other types of investments, because in his view inflation would drive the FED to raise interest rates.
On JPMorgan’s balance sheet, Dimon said they had $500 billion in cash and would insist on accumulating more, so as to be ready and prepared for higher rates due to inflation.
JPMorgan Chase and the Bitcoin Fund
Despite Dimon’s mixed views on the crypto queen, his banking giant JPMorgan Chase has launched its own fund on bitcoin.
The offering to its private bank clients began in early August and the fund on bitcoin is passively managed, offered in partnership with NYDIG, with the aim of providing a safe, cheap and regulated investment vehicle on BTC.
I wonder if Dimon’s prediction today of a 10x increase in the price of BTC over the next 5 years is in any way related to the performance of this JPMorgan Chase fund.
