Sheila Bair Says Don’t Buy Bitcoin, It’s at ‘Nosebleed Levels’

(Bloomberg) -- Sheila Bair, who was a key banking regulator in the heat of the 2008 financial crisis, says investors should avoid buying Bitcoin.

“Stay away from it,” she said late Wednesday in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “It’s volatile. It’s at nosebleed levels now. We don’t know how sustainable that is.”

“If you’re a very wealthy person with some money to risk, fine, but no -- I don’t have a lot of confidence in it,” she added.

Bair’s comments came before Mastercard Inc. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. moved to make it easier for customers to use cryptocurrencies, driving the price of Bitcoin to a record high. The credit card company is honing in on so-called stablecoins, which peg their to that of another asset, like the U.S. dollar. Bair is on the board of Paxos, a firm that focuses on such assets and believes they are a better way to invest in digital assets. She is also on the board of blockchain-technology company Spring Labs.

“The problem with Bitcoin is it is so volatile. So its original promise as a method of payment really, its volatility gets in the way of its usefulness,” she said. “I’ve always been more interested in the technology that underpins Bitcoin.”

Bair is the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and is currently the chair of the board of Fannie Mae.

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