Yeah, I mean... what am I supposed to do when dudez come out saying things like this?
Kenneth Rogoff, celebrated Harvard economist, stirred the Bitcoin hive with a salty half-apology. Even after bitcoin 12x'd since his doomsday call, rather than trying to learn about Bitcoin's value, he doubled down — and blamed Trump and criminals for his error!
Rogoff’s excellent book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, and especially the freely available data behind the research for dozens of countries over hundreds of years, was a godsend during my university years. I learned so much from him.
When I finally met Rogoff in 2018 or so, it was a total “kill your idols” moment. He had just released his unfathomably stupid book The Curse of Cash — about how we should ban cash because criminals… and cash also makes monetary policy transmission worse and negative interest rates more difficult to impose. I was trying to explain to him the virtue of competitive note issuance and monetary freedom. To my shock, he was sputtering nonsense about free banking and falsities about U.S. banking history, let alone the past monetary arrangements of Canada, Scotland, or Sweden, of which he knew nothing.
I have lost almost all of my respect for legacy academics; we definitely need new institutions of (higher) education. Bitcoin is for anyone, but not everyone, and people get bitcoin at the price they deserve.