Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took a swipe at cryptocurrencies, saying they have the power to weaken entire countries eventually.
Clinton said via video during a panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Friday in Singapore that governments around the world faced a range of new challenges, including disinformation and artificial intelligence.
“One more area that I hope nation-states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency—because what looks like a very interesting and somewhat exotic effort to literally mine new coins in order to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger,” the former Secretary of State said.
Clinton’s comments came while criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of deploying “a very large stable of hackers and those who deal in disinformation and cyberwarfare.”
In 2017, Clinton blamed Russian interference along with questionable decisions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for her loss the year before to Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential election. She highlighted Russia’s role in hacking into her campaign’s internal e-mails and later coordinating their release on WikiLeaks.
“With his oligarchic coterie, he has utilized many non-state actors to personal as well as nationalistic goals, and I think that’s going to become a greater and greater threat,” she said at the forum in Singapore.
Clinton also predicted the Biden administration would remove some punitive tariffs on China, while also calling on the world to prevent military aggression by Beijing and criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I know that there’s an ongoing process, as we speak, to try to figure out what would be the best approach with respect to the tariffs,” Clinton said. “And I would predict that there will be some changes. But they will not all disappear, because some of them in this new reality we’re living in may well be continued.”
Last month, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the administration would directly engage with Beijing to enforce commitments in a trade deal reached last year with former President Donald Trump. China is far behind its purchasing targets, in which it pledged to buy an extra $200 billion in US agriculture, energy and manufactured products over the 2017 level in the two years through the end of 2021.
President Joe Biden’s team has been reviewing US policy on China since taking office and inherited duties Trump imposed on about $300 billion of annual imports from the Asian nation in the hope of taming the goods-trade deficit. More than two years since the duties took effect, the countries are shipping merchandise to each other at the strongest pace on record, making it look as if the protracted tariff war and pandemic never happened.
Clinton said that some of the tariffs imposed during Trump’s trade war with China have “hurt” the US, particularly those on agricultural goods.
Speaking on Russia, Clinton said that Putin has sought to “hug China” to stave off potential problems in the far east, while also exercising power through non-state actors.
“He has a very large mercenary force that has been operating everywhere from Syria to the Central African Republic,” Clinton said of Putin. “He has a very large stable of hackers and those who deal in disinformation and cyberwarfare, both in and outside of the government. He’s engaged in a lot of asymmetric power moves.”
The former Democratic presidential nominee also said the US should look to counter China’s military moves.
“Of course we should cooperate on a range of issues, but we also cannot permit the kind of aggressive military build up, efforts to dominate maritime navigation, the intimidation of nations in the larger Asia-Pacific region,” Clinton said. Bloomberg News