Raoul Pal Warns for Hurtful Times Ahead in Latest Crypto Outlook

In a new interview with Delphi Media, Real Vision CEO and macro guru Raoul Pal predicts hurtful times ahead for equity and crypto asset investors.

As he unveiled his latest crypto outlook, the former Goldman Sachs executive said that the US economy can expect to see a “severe” correction, to which the U.S. Federal Reserve can only act by intervening:

“I’m anticipating a short, very sharp recession and a return to use of the Fed balance sheet, direct transfer payments to give money directly to poor people and the Fed having to support some parts of the markets again, but let’s see how it plays out.

The main point being is we’ve got the worst ahead of us. It’s not fully priced in by markets. It’s going to be faster than people expect. It’s going to be more severe than people expect and then we can look out looking forward.”

Nevertheless, on the long-term, Pal remains bullish as digital assets are still governed by Metcalfe’s Law, which dictates that a network’s value grows along with the number of users on the network. A “dramatic” surge in the number of users will be the catalyst that ignites crypto for a new take-off.

He said:

“People haven’t left the crypto ecosystem like in 2018, which is why we’ve had a much more of a sloppy sideways range, and I think that adoption continues and if it continues this way, by the time we get to 2030, we end up with five billion people or four billion people using crypto.”

Taking a possible slowdown in adoption rates in consideration, Pal added:

“Last year, we had a 186% rate of adoption. You can see what that’s like compared to the internet. Overall, it’s about twice the speed of internet adoption and that’s truly extraordinary, and it tells us that going forward, even though the internet, as it becomes a more adopted network, the rate of growth comes down, but the numbers become huge and that’s what’s important to the valuation of the market cap of crypto.

Even if we assume some slowdown, whether it slows down by the same percentage change that the internet did after year six starting at five million users. After that, it started slowing down to 43%. If we adjust it by the same amount, we get to 76% growth in crypto. We will still get to 2.8 billion users in the next four years. If we slow it down to match that of the internet, we get 1.2 billion users, and the internet at that stage was at 500 million.“