Capital Controls Blowback? Bitcoin Surges Back To Pre-China-Currency Wars Levels

At $267, Bitcoin has retraced the entire plunge from China’s initial devaluation entry into the currency wars and the Black Monday dump. It appears, just as we warned, that China’s increasing crackdown on its – until now lax – capital controls has spurred demand for alternate ‘currencies’ that remain out of the control (for now) of governments – like gold…

And Bitcoin…

It appears, just as we warned,while China is doing everything in its power to not give the impression that it is panicking, the truth is that it is one viral capital outflow report away from an outright scramble to enforce the most draconian capital controls in its history, which – as every Cypriot and Greek knows by now – is a self-defeating exercise and assures an ever accelerating decline in the currency, which authorities are trying to both keep stable while also devaluing at a pace of their choosing. Said pace never quite works out.

So what happens then: well, China’s propensity for gold is well-known. We would not be surprised to see a surge of gold imports into China, only instead of going to the traditional Commodity Financing Deals we have written extensively about before, where gold is merely a commodity used to fund domestic carry trades, it ends up in domestic households. However, while gold has historically been the best store of value in history and has outlasted every currency known to man, it is problematic when it comes to transferring funds in and out of a nation – it tends to show up quite distinctly on X-rays.

Which is why we would not be surprised to see another push higher in the value of bitcoin: it was earlier this summer when the digital currency, which can bypass capital controls and national borders with the click of a button, surged on Grexit concerns and fears a Drachma return would crush the savings of an entire nation. Since then, BTC has dropped (in no small part as a result of the previously documented “forking” with Bitcoin XT), however if a few hundred million Chinese decide that the time has come to use bitcoin as the capital controls bypassing currency of choice, and decide to invest even a tiny fraction of the $22 trillion in Chinese deposits…