Wednesday, May 17, 2023

"Crypto should be regulated as gambling, U.K. lawmakers say"

Hell, credit default swaps should be regulated as gambling if you don't own the credit. And sometimes even if you do and you are trying to force the issue.*

Mandy Rice-Davies moment dead ahead.

From Reuters via MSN, May 17:

Bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies should be regulated as gambling given the significant risks they pose to consumers, a panel of UK lawmakers said in a report on Wednesday.

Britain, which wants to become a global hub for crypto and its underlying blockchain technology, is planning its first rules for cryptoassets, which currently only comply with anti-money laundering safeguards.

Bitcoin and ether account for two-thirds of all cryptoassets and are not backed by any currency or asset, leading to volatility in prices and the potential for all money invested in them to be wiped out, the report from parliament's treasury committee said.

Regulating retail trading and investment in unbacked cryptocurrencies could create a 'halo' effect that leads consumers to think the activity is safer than it is, or protected when it is not, it said.

"We therefore strongly recommend that the Government regulates retail trading and investment activity in unbacked cryptoassets as gambling rather than as a financial service, consistent with its stated principle of ‘same risk, same regulatory outcome’," the report said.

Industry body CryptoUK said it strongly disagreed with equating the crypto sector with gambling.

"We are both concerned and disappointed by these claims which are unhelpful, false, fundamentally flawed and unsubstantiated. The statement fails to reflect the true nature, purpose and potential of the crypto industry," CryptoUK said in a statement....

....MUCH MORE

Well they would, wouldn't they?

Mandy Rice-Davies was a former model and showgirl known for her role in the Profumo affair.
When informed by the prosecuting attorney that Lord Astor disputed her version of events and denied having an affair she responded:
"Well, he would, wouldn't he?" 
*....Following the Great Financial Crisis we had a series of posts on regulation, credit default swaps, bucket shops, Federal preemption of state law (supremacy, article vi, clause 2) state anti-gambling laws and various comments from folks learned and otherwise. A snip from a November 2011 post:

Are Derivatives Contracts Nothing More than Unenforceable Gambling Debts?
...Here's the U.S, Senate testimony of Eric Dinallo, then-Superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department on October 14, 2008 (8 page PDF).
...I have argued that these naked credit default swaps should not be called swaps because
there is no transfer or swap of risk. Instead, risk is created by the transaction. Indeed, you
have no risk on the outcome of the day’s third race at Belmont until you place a bet on
horse number five to win....
...“Bucket shops” arose in the late nineteenth century. Customers “bought” securities or
commodities on these unauthorized exchanges, but in reality the bucket shop was simply
booking the customer’s order without executing on an exchange. In fact, they were
simply throwing the trade ticket in the bucket, which is where the name comes from, and
tearing it up when an opposite trade came in. The bucket shop would agree to take the
other side of the customer’s “bet” on the performance of the security or commodity.
Bucket shops sometimes survived for a time by balancing their books, but were wiped
out by extreme bull or bear markets. When their books failed, the bucketeers simply
closed up shop and left town, leaving the “investors” holding worthless tickets....
Which had been preceded by July 2010's "Financial Reform: Enforce New York's 1908 Bucket Shop Law and trash the 2,319 Page Dodd-Frank Bill":
It is time to dispense with this congressional foolishness and enforce the 1908 Bucket Shop law.
Throw in some state anti-gambling statutes and you would have prevented the financial meltdown....
And so on.
In 2009 it was Charlie Munger who, in addition to, as he put it:
"I didn't set out in life to become the assistant leader of a cult."
-Mr. Munger at the 2007 Wesco annual meeting as recorded
by T2 Partners' Whitney Tilson
Is also a name partner at a pretty damn high-buck law firm:
An Interview with Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger (BRK. A)
Grundfest: You and your partner, Warren Buffett, have for years warned about the dangers of the modern derivatives markets, particularly credit derivatives, and about interest rate swaps, currency swaps, and equity swaps.

Munger: Interest rate swaps have enormous dangers given their size and the accounting that has been allowed. But credit default derivatives took that danger to new levels of excess—from something that was already gross and wrong. In the ’20s we had the “bucket shop.” The term bucket shop was a term of derision, because it described a gambling parlor. The bucket shop didn’t buy any securities. It just enabled people to make bets against the house and the house furnished little statements of how the bets came out. It was like the off-track betting system.

Grundfest: Until the house lost its money and suddenly disappeared. Or the house made its money and suddenly disappeared.

Munger: That is right. Derivatives trading, with no central clearing, brought back the bucket shop, because you could make bets without having any interest in the basic security, and people did make such bets in the billions and billions of dollars. Some of the most admired people in finance — including Alan Greenspan — argued that derivatives trading, substituting for the old bucket shop, was a great contribution to modern economic civilization. There’s another word for this: bonkers. It is not a credit to academic economics that Greenspan’s view was so common.
There is much more.

In 2018 we had:  "Pope says credit default swaps are unethical"

 But to date the Pope has not weighed in on cryptocurrencies.

In his 2015 Encyclical, Laudato Si  Francis gave technology in general the Papal thumbs up.

In 2017 the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences held a symposium on human slavery in the 21st century and one of the speakers, Joseph Mari from the Bank of Montreal spoke on Bitcoin's role in the trade.
But no wider comment on the tech.
Personally, I think they are planning to roll out Vaticoin any day now.
at