The President of the European Central Bank and well-known crypto critic Christine Lagarde is doing her utmost to keep the eurozone insulated from the volatility of crypto assets. However, on Friday, Lagarde admitted that she cannot achieve this even for her own family.
Lagarde’s 30-year-old son invested in cryptocurrencies against her wishes and ‘lost everything,’ the French official admitted at a city council meeting in Frankfurt on Friday, according to a Reuters report.
– He ignored me and lost almost all the money he invested – Lagarde said before an audience of students.
Lagarde publicly spoke last year about her son’s crypto investments, stating that he invested in digital assets despite her numerous failed interventions and attempts to convince him he was making a mistake. Lagarde has two sons, both in their mid-thirties, but she has never publicly clarified which of the two invested in crypto.
Only after he finally suffered significant losses did Lagarde’s son admit that he should have listened to his mother, the ECB chief stated on Friday.
– It wasn’t much, but he lost everything, he lost about 60 percent. When I had another conversation with him about it then, he reluctantly accepted that I was right – she stated.
The head of the European banking system has long been vocal about her disdain for crypto. Last year, she said that all crypto assets ‘are worth nothing’ and that they ‘are not based on anything.’ When asked by reporters whether central banks should ever hold bitcoin, Lagarde dismissed such a possibility, stating that it ‘is out of the question.’
Although Lagarde openly criticizes decentralized digital assets like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, she has been a key advocate for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) for years. Under her leadership, the European Central Bank has begun actively implementing a digital euro, although a final decision on the official launch has yet to be made.
CBDCs, like the proposed digital euro, are electronic versions of fiat currency that enable mutual electronic payments without reliance on intermediaries like commercial banks.
Although CBDCs have already been adopted by a handful of countries, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Nigeria, they have become a political point in other countries like the U.S. Many CBDC skeptics have labeled them as ‘completely un-American’ and attempted to ban them in several jurisdictions due to the potential to enable governments to track financial transactions.
