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American billionaire Barry Sternlicht, the chairman of Starwood Capital Group, said he has about 2-3% of his net worth in cryptocurrency. Starwood has about $100 billion under management in debt, real estate, and energy assets. Speaking at a Bloomberg event on Friday in Miami, Sternlicht called Bitcoin a smart hedge for investors in a world that just “prints money.”
“If it goes to zero, it won’t hurt me.”
Talking about inflation, Sternlicht said that he expects the US stimulus package to have inflationary pressure on commodities, exacerbating a housing shortage and driving up rents. Back in October, Sternlicht had revealed that his crypto portfolio consists of Bitcoin and Ether due to both having their own advantages. At the time, he had said that money printing was the reason for investing in crypto assets. “The reason I own BTC is because the US government and every government in the Western hemisphere is printing money now until the end of time,” he said. While he pushed back on Bitcoin being “worthless,” according to him, Bitcoin is a “dumb coin,” with “no real purpose other than a store of value.” Meanwhile, bitcoin and crypto’s price action is of least concern for PayPal. Speaking at the Reuters Next conference, the payment giant CEO Dan Schulman noted that while “there's a lot of fascination” for BTC to be worth $100k or $25k “what's really interesting to me is can crypto or digital forms of currency add incremental utility to payments - things like programmable money, things like NFTs (non-fungible tokens), things like some DeFi applications.” At the same event, Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank (ECB) president, talked about inflation, saying it “looks like a hump. And a hump eventually declines.” She is confident that inflation will decline next year, adding, “we need to very clearly indicate that we stand ready (to act), in both directions.” Perry Warjiyo, Governor of Indonesia’s central bank, also commented on the country’s inflation, which is projected to rise towards 4% in Q2 or early Q3 of 2023.
“But by nature, interest rate decisions need to be forward-looking, need to be preemptive, need to be front-loading.”