ECB also runs marketing campaigns. Although it has a monopoly, its product has to contend with image problems – due to chronic reasons. Customer trust must therefore always be strengthened or regained. On the other hand, this also means discrediting competing products. One such competing product is Bitcoin.
ECB as a Twitter influencer
We have already reported on past attempts to badmouth Bitcoin. Now the central bank has made another attempt via its Twitter account. ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta was once again chosen as anti-Bitcoin ambassador.
🧵Crypto has relied on constantly creating new narratives to attract new investors, but has failed to deliver on its promises. Policymakers should be wary of supporting an industry that has so far produced no benefits for society.
Read the speech https://t.co/okum8fH3qf
1/3 pic.twitter.com/40OlefVExB
— European Central Bank (@ecb) June 23, 2023
The fact that bitcoin has gained value over the years against the euro and all other fiat currencies is interpreted as instability. Interesting point of view. According to this, the euro should also be very unstable, since it has gained more than 20 percent against the Turkish lira in just four weeks – quite volatile.
Panetta also criticizes that Bitcoin is centralized. Exciting perspective for someone who works at a CENTRAL bank. Now, joking aside: no matter how exaggerated the criticism may be, the Twitter postings bear witness to a lack of down-to-earthness.
Blackrock and Co. apparently clueless
The message the ECB sends with such posts makes Bitcoin advocates look naïve and clueless. An unfounded arrogance given Bitcoin’s academic, societal, and economic pervasiveness.
Especially since such statements in the course of the current institutional adoption – see Blackrock with Bitcoin ETF application or Fidelity with the crypto exchange EDX – probably harm the sender more than the addressee. Or is Panetta trying to say that the elite grads on Wall Street are all ignorant of finance? Fewer and fewer people from the financial sector are likely to buy this cutting edge.
The ECB and its monetary monotheism
But not only the message is problematic, but also its style. Apparently, the 10 commandments and the “Lord’s Prayer” were used rhetorically. Instead of “Lead us not into temptation…” it says in the Twitter post: “Resist the temptation of public cryptocurrencies”. In a subsequent posting the unique selling proposition of the euro is pointed out in the style of “thou shalt have no other gods before me”.
The Twitter postings, which are intended to strengthen trust in the euro and in the future in the digital euro, deliver beliefs instead of factual arguments, while bitcoin is classified as the stuff of the devil.
In the interests of objectivity, there is absolutely no intention of ridiculing the ECB with these pointed formulations. Rather, it should be made clear that the European Central Bank presents itself as aloof. With such clumsy euro marketing campaigns, the central bank only harms itself in the long term. Instead of discrediting other “products”, one should rather work on one’s own performance and one’s own promise of quality (monetary stability?).
