Former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer is the host of the CNBC show “Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer. “ He is also a co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street, “as well as a co-founder of financial news website TheStreet. His career in finance includes managing his own hedge fund and several years at Goldman Sachs. Cramer’s approach to investing and his energetic TV persona have made him a notable figure in financial media.
On January 2, during a conversation on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”, with Bitcoin trading at $45,658, above the $45K level for the first time since April 2022, Cramer told co-chost David Faber that Bitcoin’s rally to this level had been driven by the calmness in the market following the collapse of FTX (i.e. a bad actor being driven out of the crypto space) and the optimism over the potential approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs by the U.S. SEC.
He added:
“It could be a ‘Waiting for Godot’… no, there will be an ETF. I do think that the people who are in it for that are going to use that as a chance to sell. This thing is, you can’t kill it. And the late Charlie Munger, who was so brilliant on so many things, was blind to this … but look, I mean, it’s a reality, and it’s a technological marvel. And I think people have to start recognizing that it’s here to stay. The SEC has been against it almost the whole time … I do think that this is a remarkable comeback that was unexpected, except for all the bull who turned out to be right.“
Cramer’s comments stand in sharp contrast to his remarks back in early October 2023 amid SBF’s criminal trial, when he said he wasn’t interested in getting long the crypto as “Mr Bitcoin is about to go down big.”
On January 9, 2023, when Bitcoin was trading at around $17,276, he told his Twitter followers that this was a good chance to get out of crypto, which prompted Dan Held, Bitcoin educator and marketing partner at Trust Machines, to say that Cramer’s comment meant that the crypto market had bottomed.
