Michael Saylor, the co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, has shared his thoughts on the banking sector turmoil.
In an interview with Valuetainment, Saylor said it’s a mistake to store money in banks today, noting that the banks “are stealing” from their clients. Saylor, whose MicroStrategy is the largest holder of Bitcoin among publicly traded companies, believes people are losing trust in banks, paper currencies and the governments.
“If you’re trying to use money that requires banks, you can’t trust the banks, right? You certainly can’t trust the banks in Africa, in South America and most of Asia. It used to be Americans thought they could trust American banks now they’re realizing that they can’t trust American banks. So the first order impact of the banking crisis is people think “well maybe the money I had in the bank’s going away and so I ought to put it in a bank in cyberspace that isn’t controlled by the government or by the bankers” and that’s Bitcoin.”
You can trust Bitcoin, Saylor says
According to Saylor, the likely solution the government might look to amid the banking crisis is to print more dollars. This, he notes, can only result in monetary inflation rate going up 10%, 15% or even 20%. It is why paper currencies like the Zimbabwe dollar crashed and “is going to a nickel.”
Saylor is one of Bitcoin’s biggest bulls and he reiterated the flagship cryptocurrency’s store of value strengths as well as the fact that it cannot be controlled by the government or have more printed as the reason why it’s better than fiat currencies, or oil or land.
“You can trust Bitcoin because you can custody your own asset, you can run your own node and at the end of the day even if the Chinese want to shut it down they can’t. If the Russians want to shut it down they can’t; if any nation state wants to shut it down they can’t.”
The past three months have seen three out of four of the largest US banks go out of business – there was Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank. The outlook for the sector is that things could move from bad to worse, with the banking turmoil likely to be deeper than what was witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis.
You’ll lose 99% of your US dollar value
On what makes it a mistake to put money in the banks, Saylor points to some of the worst money in the world today. He says while “money is a store of value,” the multiple monies worldwide are “not created equal.”
In the forex sector, the worst category today are the Argentine pesos, Venezuelan Bolivars and Zimbabwe dollars. He says even the Nigerian naira is weak money as shown by official inflation rates in these countries and storing money in the banks only gets the value lost over a few years.
For instance, the Argentina peso, which is down 50% this year, is seeing a 105% inflation rate, which means having money in the bank would see one lose all of it to inflation within 10 years. In Venezuela, the losses would be in just 36 months. It’s the same even with the so-called strongest currency in the world – the US dollar.
“The only difference between the US dollar and the peso is whereas it takes 20 years to lose your family’s fortune in the peso, it takes about 90 years to lose your family’s fortune in the dollar. My house in Miami Beach was $100,000 in 1930 – it was appraised at $46 million a few years ago. Do the calculation; it’s on a path to be worth $100 million which means that the US dollar will have lost 99.9% of its value over 100 years.”
Currently, holding money in the bank in the US sees people lose 7% of it every year, and that can be as high as 15% in a bad year. Paper money has been greatly devalued and even gold that was okay money isn’t anymore.
According to the MicroStrategy boss, Bitcoin is the world’s strongest money as no one can print more of it with BTC absolutely capped at 21 million. The cryptocurrency is also global money that “no government can interdict” or inflate, he noted as he echoed previous sentiment that Bitcoin is the world’s most transformative force.
Saylor says Warren Buffett, the Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) of Omaha, knows this as a fact. Billionaire businessman and Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Charlie Munger also knows this, he added.
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