Little has gone right for Rachel Reeves since she was appointed chancellor but she has had one stroke of luck. She’s sitting on a huge pile of Bitcoin.
Don’t panic, Reeves hasn’t been playing the cryptocurrency market with taxpayers’ money. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have any left.
The coins don’t belong to her, but the UK government. Yes, we’re the proud owner of 61,245 Bitcoin that the police have seized from criminals.
Most of this national windfall came from the arrest of China-linked scammer Jian Wen in 2021. It’s largely a secret and I’d bet she’d like to keep it that way given the problem it poses.
With the Bitcoin price breaking new all-time highs following Donald Trump‘s US presidential landslide win, it’s worth more by the day.
In July, when I first wrote about the nation’s secret hoard of alt-coins, Bitcoin was trading at $65,000 (£51,000).
At the time, our 61,245 stash of virtual coins was worth almost £4billion. With Bitcoin hitting $93,326 as I write this, it’s now worth more than £5.7billion.
In one respect, that’s an awful lot of money. In another, it isn’t. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the UK’s national debt, which now stands at £2.8trillion.
But it’s still pretty handy so what will Reeves do?
With Bitcoin at an all-time high, she’ll be tempted to cash in.
That £5.7billion would secure the Winter Fuel Payment for the next four years. Or pay for almost 12 days of the NHS.
Yet I hope she doesn’t do that. I’m not a big fan of Bitcoin but I still reckon there’s a solid chance it could rocket to $100,000 and beyond.
Some reckon it could soon hit $250,000. Or even $1 million. If it did that, we’d have £61billion.
Even more if we put the cops to work catching more crypto criminals.
Bitcoin is rising today because president-elect Donald Trump embraced Bitcoin during the election, claiming he wanted to turn the US into “the crypto capital of the planet”.
Trump pledged to ease regulations, which should further boost the price, and build a strategic US Bitcoin stockpile as a national security measure.
Maybe Reeves could use our Bitcoin windfall as the building block for a UK sovereign wealth fund.
Let’s hope Rachel Reeves is better at managing Britain’s reserves than Gordon Brown was (Image: Getty)
Sadly, Reeves doesn’t appear to have a talent for managing money. She had her Parliamentary credit card suspended after running up more than £4,000 in debt.
Let’s hope she doesn’t take former Labour chancellor Gordon Brown as her inspiration.
In 1999, 25 years ago, Brown found himself sitting on an earlier store of national wealth, in the shape of our gold reserves.
Brown decided gold was finished and flogged off 395 tonnes at an average price of $276 an ounce.
That will surely go down as one of the worst trades ever.
Gold wasn’t finished. It’s the investment of the millennium, recently flying to an all-time high of $2,800.
That’s an increase of a staggering 915% on the price Brown accepted.
Brown flogged our gold reserves for £3.5billion. At today’s price of $2,625 an ounce, they’d be worth £35billion.
So will Reeves do any better? I’ve just been looking at her CV – the revised version – and I’m not hopeful.
Bitcoin is highly volatile. Sod’s law says that if Reeves holds onto it, it’ll crash. If she sells, it’ll rocket. Either way, people like me will remind her about it for years.
It’s a nightmare decision. Can she get lucky twice? I wouldn’t bet on it.
