Doug Cohen, managing director at Fiduciary Trust International, spoke with Quartz for the latest installment of our “Smart Investing” video series.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): I’ve heard that Bitcoin is a hedge, like gold could be. Is that good advice? Should investors get involved in, in, in putting some risk into Bitcoin?
DOUG COHEN (DC): So Bitcoin doesn’t have thousands of years of history. It has like, I don’t know, a dozen years or something like that. It is wildly speculative. A lot of the interactions are illicit and as I’m kind of leading you, I’m not a huge fan of it. I think it’s mostly speculative. That being said, for an investor who wants to have a hedge, I think there are some legitimate arguments to having a small position in Bitcoin. It clearly has shown it has the ability to be a valuable hedge in times of uncertainty, but it’s not really time tested. And still, at a very basic level, I struggle to understand how governments are going to allow a parallel system to develop that isn’t heavily, heavily regulated. So we’re kind of moving down that path a little bit here in the US while still opening up Bitcoin in some ways, including having ETFs, which are in the short term, have been helpful. I think it’s speculative, it’s not a bold statement, it is a speculative investment. If someone wants to have a little bit on the side, I think there’s a case for doing that. Would I put a significant amount of my assets into Bitcoin? No, but I would’ve told you that a while ago and you know, would’ve been wrong with it. Trading close to $70,000 today.
AM: So what do you think the future of Bitcoin is, five, ten years down the road? Is it a part of our regular financial system or does it take over as its own thing?
DC: I still think it’s gonna be sort of off to the side. I think it’s gonna be kind of off to the side from a transactions perspective. So as you said, there’s some, call it normalization of Bitcoin, but you still can’t do a whole lot with it. There are a few retailers or different businesses that will accept it, but not very many. And there’s still a lot of illicit activity that goes on around Bitcoin. And I think that comes back to what I was saying earlier, which is at some point I think governments, and it’s not just Bitcoin, it’s other cryptocurrencies as well. At some point I think governments are really going to want to make sure that they understand that everything is easily traceable, easily track-able, easily taxable if need be that people aren’t avoiding taxes. And there are ways that can be done. The blockchain can be very effective in terms of tracking down some things. But we’re not quite there yet. So I don’t think it’s really gonna be mainstream. What could be mainstream, not in three or five years, but maybe 15 or 20, is that we could certainly have digital currencies. The days of dollar bills could be numbered or at least minimized significantly. We could easily have digital transactions, but I think they would be Central Bank sponsored in a base, basically part of the official system.
AM: That’s really interesting. Thank you, Doug.
DC: Okay. It’s great to be with you.
