Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen likened the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX to that of the largest domino to collapse during the Great Financial Crisis.
“It’s a Lehman moment within crypto, and crypto was big enough that you’ve had substantial harm of investors, and particularly people who aren’t very well informed about the risks that they’re undertaking,” she said at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
This isn’t the first time that a comparison was made between FTX and Lehman Brothers’ 2008 bankruptcy. Still, Yellen maintained that while FTX’s crash has been dramatic, it hasn’t reverberated into the traditional banking sector.
Two weeks ago, Yellen said that the downfall of FTX strengthened her view that the cryptocurrency market requires “very careful regulation.”
“I have been skeptical, and I remain quite skeptical,” she said Wednesday.
FTX owes billions of dollars to potentially millions of creditors. Moving forward, Yellen emphasized that customer assets must be better protected.
