- A Ph.D. student at Harvard produced a study on cryptocurrency purchases.
- The list of those who offered criticism includes Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor.
- The report doesn`t state if applying sanctions is a good or bad thing.
This month, Harvard Ph.D. student Matthew Ferranti released a study. In it, he suggested that countries facing international sanctions would be able to mitigate the effects. This would be through hoarding particular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. However, based on his estimates, gold offers a more effective hedge against penalties.
Notably, Ferranti is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of economics at Harvard who is a student of Ken Rogoff. Ken is a professor there now, and a former head of the Federal Reserve Board. To those who support cryptocurrencies, this is a beam of sunshine at a time when the sky has grown gloomy due to falling prices and a controversy that is spreading like wildfire.
Moreover the article, “Hedging Sanctions Risk: Cryptocurrency in Central Bank Reserves,” can hardly be slammed as an off-the-wall think piece from a starry-eyed student. The list of those who offered criticism includes Kenneth Rogoff. He is also the former top economist at the International Monetary Fund.
“I think if I wrote this before the Russia sanctions, the academic community would have questioned the usefulness of this model. Now, with what happened to Russia, people have started to think about, yeah ok, this is something that can actually happen and it’s a risk we ought to be thinking about.”- Ferranti told Forbes
In conclusion, Ferranti says that the economic sanctions that Western countries have levied against Russia have forever changed the calculus for central banks. However, the paper doesn’t say anything about whether applying sanctions is a good or bad thing.
