DAY 3 at the Singapore FinTech Festival: The Takeaways
Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, read her keynote speech down the paper that must’ve been written almost five years ago by Janet Yellen, then head of the Fed. In Feb 2014 Yellen (at the time the head of one of the most powerful financial institutions on Earth, mind you!) said that “…it’s not so easy to regulate Bitcoin because there’s no central issuer or network operator. This is a decentralized, global [entity]… We’re looking at this.”
Today Christine Lagarde said pretty much the same: “there’s no universal case for digital currencies” and “we have to be looking at the space attentively and creatively,” something like that. Then she asked herself and the audience a rhetorical question “who is going to lead us into the digital revolution?” It was tempting yell out “hello, you’re the head of the freakin’ IMF!” but we held back. Fortunately, Lagarde easily came with the answer to own question pointing at a slide with a bronze girl who faces the famous raging Wall Street Bull: “perhaps her?”
But, other than finding out that the leader of the digital revolution is going to be made of bronze, the day was a success. Among other things, we’ve had a long chat with awesome Victoria Birch of the London law firm Norton Rose and Fulbright.
