FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) warns over crypto assets pushed by stars such as Kim Kardashian West.
This was a recent headline from the Guardian about a reality TV star pushing a one-month-old crypto. I’ll be honest, I have never heard of the FCA and I don’t know how much weight they pull ... and I also don’t care.
My initial reaction when I read this article is to go off on a rant about how the government, institutional investors and others thinking we need to be protected from ourselves. (That in essence, we are too stupid to be left alone with our money.) I will take a little different approach with this one, though. My thoughts, I don’t care about the people that get taken in by this crap.
The article published this stat:
About 2.3 million people in the UK currently hold speculative digital tokens, with 14% using credit to buy them, putting them at risk of greater financial losses.
Now, I am guessing this stat is misleading as they don’t define speculative digital tokens (do they mean alt coins, small market cap, or new coins.) Next, they don’t tell us what percentage of the people’s assets are held in these tokens or even the average amount held. What I do know is there are 67 million people in the UK, so 14 percent of 3.5 percent of the population is a small number of people, respectively. (That is the 322,000 number in the title, if you were wondering.) I would imagine you would expect to find at least that many stupid people spread throughout the population. If they buy crypto on credit and lose it, tough.
I would point out that the idea that Pump and Dumps are something new to crypto is laughable. (United States’ silver mines in the 1800s had their stock driven up to crazy amounts by greedy businessmen before a single ounce was pulled out of the ground. There was an Emu craze at one point with people overpaying for birds, I could go on with more examples, but not here.) So, just let the natural selection weed out the people buying Kim Kardashian pushed crypto and leave the rest of us to risk/spend/lose/get rich/diversify our money in our own way.
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