Nouriel Roubini calls bitcoins ‘s–coins’ at SALT conference

LAS VEGAS — Potty mouth Nouriel Roubini is stirring a new s- -tstorm over cryptocurrencies.

The notoriously bearish NYU economist — who earned the nickname Dr. Doom for predicting the financial crisis — highlighted a scatological nickname to describe Bitcoin as he blasted the digital tokens at a conference here.

“There are 500,000 items on Google if you search ‘s- -tcoins,’ ” Roubini told the crowd at the SALT conference here. “It’s a technical term.”

A year earlier, Roubini had dismissed Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology as “bulls- -t” and ridiculed cryptocurrency fanatics as “suckers.”

Given the precipitous decline in the market — Bitcoin is off 70 percent since its December 2017 peak of $20,000, to about $5,880 — Roubini appears to have hit on a popular theme.

Many other “s- -tcoins” have fared even worse, the economist noted on a panel discussion that pitted him opposite the bitcoin bull Mike Novogratz and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of the Ethereum cryptocurrency.

“I don’t care about the price of bitcoin,” Roubini demurred after Novogratz, a former hedge fund manager, challenged him to wear a bullish Bitcoin T-shirt if the price of the cryptocurrency surpassed $6,000 by Christmas.

Novogratz, for his part, offered to wear a T-shirt saying “Nouriel was right” if the price of Bitcoin fails to scale that $6,000 mark.

Lubin, meanwhile, countered that many of Roubini’s points against cryptocurrencies were based on old data.

A year ago at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, Roubini had called the blockchain a “glorified Excel spreadsheet,” noting that cryptocurrency holders still go through centralized exchanges to clear their transactions.

The SALT conference is organized by Anthony Scaramucci, who served a 10-day stint as White House communications director until he launched into a profanity-laced attack on his political rivals during a 2017 interview.