This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The Canterbury Tales’ Pardoner is perhaps the earliest villain of English literature. Chaucer traduces him for passing off pigs’ bones and pillowcases as holy relics, using flattery to flog them to clients anxious about God’s judgment.
But I have always thought his treatment a trifle unfair. Surely, the poor pardoner was simply a medieval incarnation of the modern retirement planner.
In an age when life expectancy was in the 30s, it made more sense to invest in life after death rather than life after work. Indeed, with his bleating goat voice and lank hair “yelow as wex”, the pardoner sounds a lot like my own financial adviser.
Moreover, the pardoner’s fragments of the Holy Cross probably had more intrinsic value than many of the financial products hawked by “respectable” City firms today.
I am referring of course to the mind-bending wonderland of crypto currency. It’s a world I have kept at arm’s length, but now I can no longer ignore — and maybe, as I will explain, have been too hasty to dismiss.
You see, I have a strict missionary-with-socks-on approach to investments. I like equities. For all the volatility of stockmarkets, I find it comforting that when you own a share in a company, there are real people labouring away to grow my capital.
Crypto, by contrast, struck me as a tulip boom, a South Sea bubble, an investment version of a BDSM dungeon. Over the years, I have suffered silently as airport chauffeurs bored about the differences between Bitcoin, Ethereum and Binance whilst we crawled along the Chiswick flyover.
I have watched with a detached distaste the courtship of the crypto-bros and MAGA movement, culminating in the recent spectacle of the Trump “meme” coin.
Suburban investors are now asking me if they should sell their rental flats and dive into crypto
But now this topic is starting to come up at my suburban dinner parties, and reluctantly I need to be more engaged. The strangulation of the buy-to-let market by rising mortgage rates and vindictive over-regulation has created a new class of crypto investors. Soft-left professionals of my acquaintance, doctors or TV executives who bought a student slum in Newcastle or two-bed flat in Crystal Palace as a retirement nest egg, are asking me if they should instead dive into crypto.
I can’t really blame them. BlackRock, the world’s largest (and most sanctimonious) fund manager is offering crypto funds. The Financial Conduct Authority is legitimising this rackety asset class by committing to “clear regulation that supports a safe, competitive, and sustainable crypto sector”.
And I don’t think it will be long before my own hapless adviser comes knocking with an “interesting diversification opportunity”. Myself, I still won’t be piling in — I value my sleep too much.
And yet, I can see a future where crypto can play a socially useful role. For a glimpse of this future, take a look at Argentina. In a country which has been a byword for monetary chaos, crypto usage as a per centage of population is the highest in the Western hemisphere.
The long-suffering Argies are, by and large, not speculating to get rich quick. Instead, they are using US-dollar denominated “stable coins” as a more dependable store of value and means of exchange than their debased local currency.
A crypto-exchange implosion is seen as lower risk than the traditional hole-in-the-wall cash exchanges or their own unreliable government.
British sterling may be in better health than the Argentine peso. However, not since the 1970s has the value of the pound in our pocket felt so precarious. Compounding inflation means I can’t eat out in town with Mrs Ned for less than 300 quid.
Our currency is tumbling in the foreign exchanges against a resurgent dollar. And we are one bad Budget away from the bond markets punishing us with usurious borrowing costs.
Compared to Rachel Reeves’s dubious “securonomics”, Bitcoin looks like a storm-proof harbour. I don’t pretend to understand the algorithms which underpin this granddaddy of crypto, but since 2008 it has been expanding its supply at a precisely predictable rate, creating growing confidence in its ability to hold value.
That’s a longer and more honest track record than Reeves’s own. The year Bitcoin began she was still pretending to be an economist for the Halifax Building Society.
Add to this currency uncertainty the growing friction of cross-border trade and we have a recipe for a new, very different breed of crypto user in this country.
As one exasperated friend in the retail trade said to me: “My exports are getting more expensive. I am dealing with ever crazier red tape. And now there’s the prospect of tariffs. I finally get the crypto dream of a world where you can circumvent government and live in your own land beyond its reach.”
The financial world of the near future is going to be one where we’ll have to swallow quite a few impossible things before breakfast. And it’s one where our 14th century pardoner might feel right at home. Anyone for PopeCoin? Google it — yes, it’s a thing.
