$25B Bank Bailout Poster Boy Jamie Dimon Isn’t Fond of Crypto

Always making friends wherever he goes, JP Morgan Chase Chair and CEO Jamie Dimon took to CNBC’s Squawkbox on Thursday morning to call cryptocurrency a “fraud.”

“Bitcoin itself is a hyped-up fraud, it’s a pet rock…I called it a decentralized Ponzi scheme. The hype around this thing has been extraordinary. Crypto itself doesn’t do anything.”

Dimon knows about issues like financial fraud and monetary schemes. In the years since the housing bubble burst in 2008 as a result of banks bundling and dealing toxic mortgage-backed securities, his JP Morgan Chase bank has received more than $25 billion in government bailouts. The whole of his banking industry took a total of $200 billion to save their hides after they spent the 90s and 00s driving the push for worthless, high-risk mortgages for people who couldn’t afford them.

And as we’ve noted before, the $200 billion estimate is actually a lowball estimate as that was just direct payments to the banks from the federal government. A study by the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College suggests the cumulative commitment of the bank housing bailout, which included asset purchases plus lending was $29 trillion in total.