JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are advising their clients against bitcoin (BTC), according to an American wealth manager, Cointelegraph reports.
Adam Pokornicky, chief operating officer at Digital Asset Investment Management (DAIM), a US-registered investment adviser for digital assets, claimed that his firm almost lost a client due to the banks’ intervention.
Pokornicky described his client as a lawyer and a “high net worth individual,” adding that they’ve been acquainted for a long time. “He’s both a friend and someone I’ve worked with over the years,” the wealth manager explained.
According to Pokornicky, his client was ready to buy a minor amount of BTC for his portfolio, but had a sudden change of heart after talking to advisers from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. “For him going from wanting to buy 1 Bitcoin to him not being interested means he was talked out of it,” said Pokornicky, whose attempts to get more context have been unsuccessful. “I still don’t know what was said to him”.
The wealth manager said Wall Street institutions tend to advise against crypto as per their company guidelines: “My partner and I both worked on the buy side at a hedge fund and/or trading for most of our careers and we have an inordinate amount of Wall Street friends and colleagues that still work at big banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman, JPM, Wells Fargo, Merrill/BofA who are completely restricted from buying bitcoin or have to go through insane compliance hoops to do it. The advisers that work for the wealth management divisions have a hard no bitcoin policy.”
JPMorgan’s public relationship with cryptocurrencies has been complex. The bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon is a renowned bitcoin naysayer who went from saying that he “doesn’t really give a shit about bitcoin” to launching JPM Coin, a stablecoins-inspired digital asset.
Goldman Sachs entered the industry a while ago, having invested in a number of key projects like payments application Circle and cloud-based supply-chain company Tradeshift.
When asked whether he managed to pursue his client to get into bitcoin after all, Pokornicky replied: “No not yet. My sense is he’ll come around, most likely at higher prices. They usually all do eventually.”
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
Has Buffet blundered?
One investor who will regret not investing in bitcoin is the crypto-hating tycoon Warren Buffet, according to financial analyst and TV presenter Max Keiser.
Buffett, the fifth-richest person on the planet, has repeatedly expressed his unfriendly stance toward bitcoin (BTC), once describing it as “rat poison squared.”
Keiser, a a bitcoin bull since it was worth $1, is confident that Buffett will look foolish as the top crypto skyrockets after the halving.
On May 2, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway reported a $50 billion Q1 loss, with Buffett admitting a major investment mistake. Keiser subsequently argued that the legendary 89-year-old investor “killed his reputation by being stupid about BTC.”
He tweeted on May 3: “Now that Buffett is out of the game and stock buybacks are rightly being called out as fraudulent, investors will ask… If Buffett was dead wrong about so much, was he also wrong about #Bitcoin and Gold? ANSWER: YES. Buffett killed his reputation by being stupid about BTC.”
Keiser further tweeted that it is time to leave Buffett in the past, outlining that millennials and Gen Z should look to bitcoin. The bitcoin bull also highlighted that Buffett “was already way overrated,” as he missed not only bitcoin investment, but also gold, Apple and Amazon.