Richard Brian/Reuters
- Mark Mobius said cryptocurrencies are more like a religion than an investment.
- In a CNBC interview, he said they should be used as a means to have fun, not invest.
- Instead, the founder of Mobius Capital Partners said to look to stocks to hedge against high inflation.
The legendary investor Mark Mobius said cryptocurrencies may be fun, but investing in stocks is the way to hedge against the high rate of inflation.
Cryptocurrencies shouldn't be seen as a means to invest, the founder of Mobius Capital Partners said in a CNBC interview Wednesday. Instead, he said they're "a means to speculate and have fun."
"The bitcoin situation and the cryptocurrency situation is religion. It's not an investment; it's a religion," he said. "People believe in it; people think they're getting richer, and that's fine. As long as the music continues to play, it's great. Once that music stops, then we're going to be in real trouble."
That so-called music has pushed bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, and ethereum, the second largest, to all-time high prices in the last month. Even meme tokens dogecoin and shiba inu coin have taken spots in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Even so, Mobius said, stocks are "definitely the answer" to hedge against inflation, which will likely linger at decade-high levels through 2022. "You've got to go back to stocks at the end of the day," he told CNBC.
Mobius, a pioneer of emerging markets investments, has been hesitant about cryptocurrencies before. In a September interview, he told Bloomberg that El Salvador's use of bitcoin as a form of payment wouldn't catch on. "You don't need bitcoin, you don't need cryptocurrency," he said at the time.
Mobius isn't the only big name in finance to be bearish on cryptocurrencies. JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon recently called bitcoin "worthless."