LAS VEGAS — Nouriel Roubini is crapping on cryptocurrencies again.
The notoriously bearish NYU economist — who earned the nickname Dr. Doom for predicting the financial crisis — highlighted a scatological nickname to describe bitcoin as he blasted the digital tokens at a Wednesday conference here.
“There are 500,000 items on Google if you search ‘s–tcoins,’” Roubini told the crowd at the SALT Conference here. “It’s a technical term.”
A year earlier, Roubini had dismissed bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology as “bulls–t” and ridiculed cryptocurrency fanatics as “suckers.”
Roubini may have history on his side. Bitcoin is down 70 percent from its December 2017 peak of $20,000, recently trading at $5,881.16, according to Coindesk.
Many other many other “s–tcoins” have fared even worse, the economist noted on a panel discussion that pitted him opposite the noted bitcoin bull Mike Novogratz and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
“I don’t care about the price of bitcoin,” Roubini demurred after Novogratz, a former hedge fund manager, challenged him to wear a bullish bitcoin T-shirt if the price of the cryptocurrency surpassed $6,000 by Christmas.
Novogratz, for his part, offered to wear a T-shirt saying “Nouriel was right” if the price of bitcoin failed to scale the $6,000 Christmas hurdle.
Lubin, meanwhile, countered that many of Roubini’s points against cryptocurrencies were based on old data.
A year ago at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Roubini had called the blockchain a “glorified Excel spreadsheet,” noting that cryptocurrency holders still go through centralized exchanges to clear their transactions.
The SALT conference is organized by Anthony Scaramucci, who served a 10-day stint as White House communications director until he launched into a potty-mouthed attack on his political rivals during a July 2017 interview with a reporter.