Ex-SEC chair Gary Gensler has a blunt response on Trump's tariffs
Gary Gensler, the former head of the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has castigated Donald Trump's tariff policy, noting that his administration has imposed a 'self-inflicted injury.'
Gensler pointed out that risks related to China remained elevated and could rattle U.S. financial markets. 'I think it's not going to end well,' Gensler told CNBC. 'They're tough negotiators.. but the best way to handle the situation is to be consistent, to be honorable.. and to take the toughest messages private and one-on-one.'
Gensler, who resigned this January, was reflecting on his own negotiations with China's Ministry of Finance under the Biden administration. 'They think time's on their side and they can outwait the volatility,' Gensler said.
Meanwhile, Gensler also outlined a grim forecast for the majority of altcoins, or cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. While many financial assets are influenced by a mix of fundamentals and market sentiment, Gensler warned that altcoins were largely driven by sentiment.
'If you were interested in [crypto], think about [how] every financial asset sort of trades on a bit of fundamentals and sentiment, but this field is almost 99% – or maybe one might say 100% – sentiment and very little on fundamentals," Gensler said.
"While something like Bitcoin may persist for a long time — because there's [more than] 7 billion people around the globe... There's 10,000 or 15,000 others of these tokens [known as altcoins]," Gensler said. "Think through your own risk — your own personal risk — about where are the fundamentals, and if this is just about sentiment, then generally those don't end up well, and most then go down."
Although Gensler differentiated Bitcoin from altcoins, he emphasized that the long-term utility of most altcoins was questionable: "I don't think we humans will have a fascination with ten or 15,000 meme or sentiment tokens trading over the years," Gensler said.
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