Christine Lagarde Is Leaving the ECB: Here’s What She Really Thought About Bitcoin

From calling BTC highly speculative to ruling it out of central-bank reserves, her position on the asset remained consistently negative. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde announced earlier this week that she will step down on February 7, 2027, about eight months before her term is scheduled to end. The former IMF chief has led the ECB since November 2019, a period during which she became one of the most prominent critics of Bitcoin and crypto among global central bankers. Worth Nothing Her hostility toward BTC and the broader market dates back to January 2021. At the time, she spoke at the Reuters Next conference and described the largest cryptocurrency as a “highly speculative asset” and accused it of facilitating funny business as well as money laundering, even though we know that the public blockchain allows everyone to trace each transaction. Unlike banks. She also argued that regulation had to be coordinated globally because such loopholes would inevitably be exploited. One of her strongest statements came in 2022 when she said crypto assets were “worth nothing” and were “based on nothing.” She claimed that there was no underlying asset or structure providing a...