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Bitcoin hits record high — buoyed by a surge of interest from mom-and-pop investors

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Bitcoin has hit a record high. NPR’s David Gura asked why.

DAVID GURA, BYLINE: Bitcoin has staged a pretty incredible comeback. Not long after it set the previous record just shy of $69,000 in November of 2021, the cryptocurrency’s price cratered as crypto companies collapsed and regulators in the Justice Department went after some of its biggest names.

ESWAR PRASAD: I’m surprised, and I certainly wish I’d bought some Bitcoin a couple of years ago.

GURA: Economist Eswar Prasad is a professor at Cornell University and the author of a book called “The Future Of Money.” Bitcoin hit $69,202 on Tuesday.

PRASAD: We are at an important moment in the mainstreaming of crypto.

GURA: Earlier this year, Wall Street’s top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission, reluctantly approved a new kind of investment fund tied to the price of Bitcoin. That’s made it easier for people to add Bitcoin to their portfolios, and many of them have – billions of dollars have flowed into these Bitcoin ETFs. And Prasad says it’s had a knock-on effect on the whole market.

PRASAD: The SEC decision, to which it was certainly dragged screaming and kicking, has given a veneer of legitimacy to cryptocurrency investments.

GURA: The SEC was forced to do that after suffering a legal setback. But Pat Tschosik, who’s a senior portfolio strategist at Ned Davis Research, says the SEC has emphasized it has not endorsed Bitcoin itself.

PAT TSCHOSIK: You know, it remains an incredibly risky asset, and they want investors to know that.

GURA: But the SEC’s approval led to a wave of enthusiasm and optimism and new applications for funds tied to other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum. But it’s anyone’s guess where this speculative asset goes from here. Shortly after it hit that new record, its price tumbled – the kind of swing that’s par for the course with crypto.

David Gura, NPR News, New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Based in New York, David Gura is a correspondent on NPR's business desk. His stories are broadcast on NPR's newsmagazines, All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition, and he regularly guest hosts 1A, a co-production of NPR and WAMU.

Previously, Gura was a correspondent for NBC News and an anchor for MSNBC. His reporting aired on NBC Nightly News and TODAY, and MSNBC's dayside and primetime programs, including The 11th Hour, Deadline: White House and MTP Daily.

Gura travels widely across the United States and around the world. In recent months, his reporting has centered on the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout. In Texas, he covered a surge in cases that strained Houston's hospitals. On the eve of an eviction crisis in Oklahoma, Gura profiled people who had waited months for jobless benefits.

He has anchored special coverage, often from the field. During Hurricane Dorian, he broadcasted live from the Outer Banks in his home state of North Carolina. Gura reported from Virginia Beach, Virginia, after a mass shooting at the city's municipal complex, and from El Paso, Texas, after an attack on shoppers at a Walmart Supercenter. After a gunman targeted the Tree of Life – Or L'Simcha Congregation, Gura anchored MSNBC's coverage from Pittsburgh.

For almost two years, he hosted Up with David Gura on MSNBC, a lively roundtable that aired on Saturday and Sunday mornings, featuring a motley group of guests, including lawmakers, reporters, columnists, strategists, actors and comedians. During the 2020 primary, Gura interviewed many of the Democratic presidential candidates, and he took the show on the road to the Texas Tribune Festival.

Before he joined NBC News and MSNBC, Gura was a correspondent for Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio, and a contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He co-anchored Bloomberg Surveillance, the network's flagship morning program, and after the 2016 election, he launched Bloomberg Markets: Balance of Power, which focused on the intersection of politics and policy.

Previously, Gura was a senior reporter for Marketplace, the public radio business and economics program, and its primary back-up host. From the organization's Washington bureau, he covered budget battles, showdowns and shutdowns and the implementation of financial reform, and he also spent a lot of time on the road, looking at how legislation and regulations affect Americans beyond the Beltway.

Gura's writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Columbia Journalism Review and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has been recognized by the National Press Foundation, the National Constitution Center and the French-American Foundation, and he is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

An alumnus of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Gura received his bachelor's degree in history and American studies, with honors, from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He also studied political science in La Paz, Bolivia, at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and the Universidad Católica Boliviana.

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