On Monday (October 18), billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn, the Chairman of American conglomerate Icahn Enterprises, shared his thoughts on the state of the markets, inflation, and potential use of Bitcoin as a hedge against higher inflation.

Icahn’s comments were made during an interview with Scott Wapner, the host of CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report“.

Here are a few highlights from this interview (based on CNBC’s transcript of the interview):

On the State of the U.S. Stock Market

“I will tell you this that as far as I’m concerned, the market, one day, and I believe one day in the long run and I don’t know how long it is and I think you have to be a fool to try to tell you how long it is in this kind of a market, in the long run, we’re certainly going to hit the wall and people may say to me, well, anybody can say that…

“I really think there will be a crisis the way we’re going, the way we’re printing money, the way we’re going into inflation, I think if you look around you, you see this inflation all around you and I don’t know how you deal with that in the long term.“

On Bitcoin and Whether It Has Intrinsic Value

“We’ve got a lot of smart guys working at Icahn & Company, and we just don’t understand bitcoin. I’m not saying it’s bad or good; I’m just saying we don’t understand it. We’re not going to invest in something we don’t get…

“I think the jury’s out on it. The jury is really out on whether it is or whether it’s not… If inflation gets rampant, I guess it does have value, but will inflation get rampant or will the government come in as they did in China and say stop the thing pretty much? So there’s so many variables in it that is a very difficult thing to invest in…“

Back on May 26, the billionaire investor was interviewed by Caroline Hyde on Bloomberg TV’s “Bloomberg Markets: The Close“.

Here are some highlights from that interview:

  • “I really think we’re pumping a lot of money into this money a lot of money into this economy and obviously you’re going to get inflation… you already have it. So you have to be able to deal with that inflation and you have to be able to put on the brakes, I think.“
  • “If you look at a lot of these investments today… I’m not saying they’re all bad… While I don’t own cryptocurrency, I think there could be something to it.“
  • “I think we’re getting to a certain excesses here [i.e. in the stock market]… On a value basis, a lot of these countries are ridiculously priced… and so eventually you just can’t have this without excess inflation, and so there’s going to be a price to pay.“
  • “A currency like this cryptocurrency, well you look at it and say ‘it really has no value’… That’s what the critics say — and I don’t own any at this point — but if you’re looking for something where you might have another store of value, the criticism is a little bit, shall I say wrong-headed when you say ‘well, what’s the value of a cryptocurrency’. Well, what’s the value of the dollar? The only value of the dollar really is because you can use it to pay taxes.“
  • “With Ethereum, it’s the underlying blockchain… Ethereum has two things. You can use it as a payment system, or you can use it as a store value.“
  • “Bitcoin is different. I mean, to me, it is just a store of value.“
  • “I am looking at the whole business and how I might get involved in it with Icahn Enterprises and in a relatively big way because I do think it’s here to stay in one form or another.”
  • “Big way for us would not be to buy a few coins or something… You know, I’m not going to buy a few coins. as it. I don’t believe in trading the market if I can help it.“
  • “A big way for us would be a billion dollars, a billion and a half dollars, something like that, but that would be a sort of a big way I guess for us, but sometimes we go bigger than that, sometimes a lot smaller. I’m not going to say exactly, but a lot of these others things, though, I think they are overvalued.“

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

Image Credit

Featured Image by “Donbrandon” via Pixabay