Charlie Munger goes off on crypto, says China made the right decision when they banned it

“I wish they’d never been invented,” Warren Buffett’s right-hand man and the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said of cryptocurrency on Friday while being interviewed at the Sohn Hearts & Minds Investment Conference in Sydney, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Believe me, the people who are getting in cryptocurrencies are not thinking about the customer, they’re thinking about themselves. Just look at them. I wouldn’t want any one of them to marry into my family,” the Australian Financial Review reported.

“I want to make my money by selling people things that are good for them, not things that are bad for them,” Munger added. 

He also said that he supports China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency and frowned upon the U.S.’s heavy involvement with it.

“The Chinese made the correct decision, which is just to simply ban them,” Munger said.

And Munger slammed Bitcoin specifically. 

“Of course I hate the Bitcoin success,” he said. “I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth, nor do I like just shuffling out of your extra billions of billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air.” 

Beyond his distaste for cryptocurrency, Munger had harsh words for the current market, likening it to the late 1990s boom that eventually ended in a bust. 

“Some of the valuations we saw in the dotcom boom were higher. But overall, I consider this as being even crazier than the dotcom boom, which blew up in 2000,” Munger said.

But Munger isn’t opposed to all new things. He voiced his support on Friday for electric-vehicle company BYD Auto, which is backed by Berkshire Hathaway, calling it “one of the best companies in the world,” and celebrated the shift toward using renewable energy over coal, gasoline, and diesel.