CEO of BlackRock Inc. Larry Fink said on Wednesday that the now-defunct FTX crypto exchange seems to have done “misbehaviors,” but that the technology behind crypto is important for the future.
“We’ll have to wait and see how everything goes with FTX,” BlackRock CEO said. “I mean, we can make all the decisions right now, and it looks like there were big mistakes with big results.”
He said this at an event put on by the New York Times DealBook. He also said that he thinks most crypto companies “aren’t going to be around” in the future.
After its sudden collapse, FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States on November 11. It said it could owe money to more than 1 million creditors.
He said that BlackRock put $24 million into FTX through a billionaire fund it runs. Sam Bankman-FTX Fried also has investments from Temasek Holdings, the venture capital fund Tiger Global, and Sequoia Capital.
Fink said that despite the problems with FTX, the technology behind crypto “will be very important.” He also said, “I think tokenization of securities will be the next generation for markets and the next generation for securities.”
Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she is still skeptical about cryptocurrencies and wants them to be regulated.
Fink painted a bleak picture of the economy, pointing out that inflation is higher than usual, interest rates are high, growth is low, and there isn’t much room for fiscal stimulus.
He said, “We’re actually going to go through a period of what I’d call malaise.” “We just won’t have the kind of real growth in the economy that we were used to.”
Still, he thinks it is a better time to invest, especially in things that do well when interest rates go up.
