Michael Novogratz, a former trader or hedge fund manager who had recently gained prominence in the bitcoin business had recently called for repairing the capitalism, which was to possibly take a toll on Wall Street. He had primarily pointed out to the rise in income gap and the absence of investment in publicly available education in the United States.
To begin, a ‘controversial’ Wall Street transaction tax could be taken into consideration, which would also extend into trades relating to cryptocurrency as well. Novogratz proceeded to tell CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he felt a that the country was in the need of a redistribution of wealth; and that there were different ways to do that, Wall Street being one such example.
It is important to notice how Novogratz isn’t the only one criticizing the inadequacies in the current economic system. Other business leaders like Jamie Dimo, Howard Schultz, Ray Dalio and even Warren Buffett have called for solutions to fix a widening income gap and the situation of underinvestment in public education.
Mirroring the 1930s, the inequalities between the poor and rich in America is quite high, as posted by Ray Dalio to a paper posted online earlier in April. The top one percent of the population’s wealth is considerably more than the bottom ninety percent combined. He called these two issues an ‘existential risk for the US’.
Novogratz took the liberty to point out to Milton Friedman, an American economist and an alleged champion of free-market capitalism that he had been writing during a time when there was a far higher marginal tax rate, as well as workers had a bigger share of income and profits. If Milton saw where things were in the current day, he would indeed have a different view, according to Notogratz.
Novogratz grew to fame when the Goldman Sachs macro trader had launched a cryptocurrency merchant bank, named Galaxy Digital in 2017, only a month before Bitcoin had managed to reach its all time high near $20,000. The largest cryptocurrency in the world had even doubled in value since January, trading at nearly $8000.
Although not as grand as its all-time high, bitcoin has very successfully taken the position as the digital version of gold and an efficient store of value, as briefed by Novogratz in that Squawk Box interview.
