Economist David Rosenberg Pleads Ignorance on Bitcoin After Predicting Massive Bubble

Economist David Rosenberg has pleaded “ignorance on bitcoin” after saying that the cryptocurrency was in a massive bubble. He admitted that bitcoin has exceeded his expectation but he still prefers gold because he understands it a lot better than bitcoin.

‘Bitcoin Has Exceeded Almost Everybody’s Expectations’

David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Rosenberg Research, admitted Thursday on Trading Nation that bitcoin had exceeded his expectation.

His admission came after he said in December that bitcoin was “in a massive bubble.” The economist told Bloomberg at the time that BTC was “just a classic, follow-the-herd, extremely crowded trade.” Furthermore, he made the easily-disproven claim that bitcoin’s code does not limit the supply to 21 million coins, believing that “there’s really nothing in the protocol to suggest that the supply of bitcoin can’t go up once we hit that limit.”

When asked on Thursday about how he sees 2021 playing out for bitcoin, Rosenberg said:

I’ll just plead ignorance on bitcoin. I just happen to understand gold a lot more.

He proceeded to compare bitcoin to gold. “I’ve been very bullish on gold,” he noted. “The one thing I know about gold is that it has one-fifth the volatility that bitcoin does.” While reiterating that he prefers gold to bitcoin, the economist conceded:

I think bitcoin has exceeded almost everybody’s expectations, maybe not everybody, certainly has exceeded mine.

Looking at bitcoin’s chart, Rosenberg was also asked whether he sees bitcoin as “the biggest bubble going on right now.” He replied:

I’d say that there’s some other high flying stocks in the S&P 500 that could rival that but I would say yeah … all you had to do was take a look at the chart of bitcoin for the past couple of months and it looks parabolic.

Pointing out that one can overlay the bitcoin chart for the past couple of months with the dot-com stocks, he concluded: “I’m not going to say it’s going to plunge like the dot-com stocks did but the parabolic move in bitcoin in such a short time period I would say, for any security, is highly abnormal.”

Nonetheless, Rosenberg said that for investors who “want to get rich quick” and “can stomach the volatility, I’m not going to tell you not to go buy bitcoin.”