Bitcoin: The Crypto Winter of Our Discontent
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
With your money briefing, I'm J.R. Whalen at the Wall Street Journal in New York.
What is causing Bitcoin's longest slump and when might a thaw come?
Bitcoin's longest slump in its 10-year history has created what many are calling a crypto winter. So when is the thaw coming? We'll bring in the journal's cryptocurrency reporter in a moment for some answers. First, these money and market stories you should know. From 2015 to 2018, labor force participation rate, or the share of Americans working or seeking work, stabilized around 63%. And that's defied expectations for declines as the population ages. Well, now the White House is pushing for policies to encourage more people to work as millions of baby boomers retire. The White House said the government could encourage greater labor force participation if it advanced policies that help to reduce the cost of child care and giving women greater incentive to work.
Women in their late 20s and early 30s have been driving up the labor force participation rate of prime age workers between ages 25 and 54 since 2016. However, the overall labor force rate for women remains below the rate for men. And a recent Federal Reserve study found more than 60% of working-age women who aren't working or are working part-time and have a young child said childcare played a role in their work decision. And a study from the National Academy of Sciences reveals that women who have a male twin were less likely than women with a twin sister to graduate high school or finish college, get married, or have children. The women with a male twin were 15.2% less likely than women with a female twin to graduate from high school and 3.9% less likely to complete college.
The study focused on children born in Norway from 1967 to 1978, including 13,800 twins out of a total of 728,800 people.
How has the crypto market's overall value changed since its January peak?
and it identified prenatal exposure to the male twin's testosterone as the cause rather than to the experience of being raised with a brother. In fact, the same pattern held even among women whose male twin died within a year or a few weeks. Call it the winter of our discontents. Call it darkness before dawn. Whatever you call it, Bitcoin's longest slump in its 10-year history has left many cryptocurrency investors out in the cold, waiting for an uptick. And the journal's cryptocurrency reporter, Paul Vigna, is here to sort it out. So, Paul, it's not just Bitcoin that's in a significant slump here. The total market value of Bitcoin is of all cryptocurrencies is down, I saw in your story, 85% from its peak from January last year?
Sure. And that's not even the worst. I mean, it was down more. I'm using air quotes, come back a little bit. You haven't had a lot of movement. The interesting thing is that you can look at Bitcoin and you can draw a couple of sharp lines in its timeline. 2017 was a huge run up. 2018 was a huge rundown. Now we're at 2019 and the rundown is still going on. And the thing is that people were surprised by how long this has lasted. Everybody thought, well, 2017, these numbers are, you know, there's so much momentum and it's so much speculation that this will never, this will never stay. They hit 20,000, right? This will never stay.
Why did the 2017–2018 boom turn into a prolonged crash for cryptocurrencies?
Well, we'll come down a little bit, whatever. 2018, that actually happened. And they still were saying, well, it'll come back. It'll come back. You know, well, you know, OK, yeah, it's down now, but it'll come back. The summer comes around. It's still down. Summer 2018. Still down. It'll come back. The fall comes around. Still down. Moving down. It'll come back. The end of 2018, they started realizing that not only was it not coming back, a lot of these startups and companies that had raised money in crypto terms and kept their money in crypto terms were now wiped out because the losses were so large.
There's a company you spoke to that said, all we can do right now is serve coffee. We're trying to avoid layoffs, but in terms of frills and office supplies, we can't do that.
Right. That was Ledger, a company that makes these little hardware wallets. And they're one of the companies, they're in sort of a different bucket in terms of companies.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:09
2
What is causing Bitcoin's longest slump and when might a thaw come?
0:09–2:00
3
How has the crypto market's overall value changed since its January peak?
2:00–3:31
4
Why did the 2017–2018 boom turn into a prolonged crash for cryptocurrencies?
3:31–6:44
5
How are crypto startups and companies coping with depleted treasuries and layoffs?
6:44–9:08
6
What role (or absence) of institutional investors has impacted the crypto downturn?
9:08–13:53
7
How did the ICO boom contribute to the crypto winter and what replaced it?
13:53–13:58
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from WSJ Your Money Briefing
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