Alejandro Zelaya, Minister of Finance of El Salvador, reacted to recent media attacks on the nation’s strategy of investing in Bitcoin (BTC) by calling the accusations of tax risks “extremely superficial.”
During a press conference held on Monday, Zelaya responded to a journalist’s question about the government’s reaction to Bitcoin’s sharp decline emotionally:
“There is a clear criticism of Bitcoin as such, not of El Salvador’s strategy. El Salvador is what interests them the least, they are not interested [a los medios] what happens to our economy, they are not interested in what happens to our people, what happens to inflation.
The official highlighted the inadmissibility of the accusations that the country’s budget has lost about $40 million from the cryptocurrency price falling from the high point of $60,300 at which El Salvador first bought BTC in October 2021. Zelaya pointed out the hypothetical possibility of a BTC rally:
“I have said repeatedly, an alleged loss of $40 million has not occurred because we have not sold the coins,”
Zelaya also dismissed assumptions about high fiscal risk as humorous and ignorant, while calling the risk “extremely minimal.”
Nowadays, El Salvador owns 2,301 bitcoins, which is equivalent to about $50 million at press time. In fiat equivalent, that’s less than half the money the nation has invested in Bitcoin through its purchases in October 2021 and May 2022, when BTC was worth $30,700.
Like the cryptocurrency market in general, BTC has been declining from its all-time high in November 2021 (around $69,000) with the downward trend accelerating over the past month and a half after a series of incidents such as the Terra crash and Celsius fiasco as well as the rise in world inflation.
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