Bitcoin: the governor of the Banque de France warns about AI financed on credit

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The timing is bad for the market. Bitcoin slipped below $77,000 this Tuesday morning, driven by a Nasdaq 100 which fell into correction.

The scene takes place on Monday November 2 at the World in Progress forum, organized in Barcelona by the Spanish media group Prisa. The round table is entitled “Central banks: independence, stability and growth”, as indicated on the official page of the Bank of Spain. Around the table, Emmanuel Moulin, his Spanish counterpart José Luis Escrivá and the former vice-president of the ECB Luis de Guindos.

#WIPBCN2026 How to preserve European economic stability before global uncertainty? Luis de Guindos, José Luis Escrivá and Emmanuel Moulin analyze the pressures of public relations, inflation and international tensions pic.twitter.com/Xz1GTgFE9v

Moulin is careful not to pronounce the word “bubble”. According to the EFE agency, he even dodged the question of tech stock market valuations.

His fear concerns the piping. These investments “are today increasingly financed by debt,” he explained according to AFP. They are also based on “very high” profit prospects. He also fears that a rise in interest rates will make these returns out of reach.

Then comes the sentence which directly concerns European savers. “We can therefore have a contagion effect in Europe in the event of a fall in the valuations of companies linked to AI in the United States,” warned the governor. Europeans hold between 15 and 20% of American securities, according to estimates cited by AFP.

José Luis Escrivá provides a counterpoint. For the Spanish governor, “it is obvious that the valuations are high”, but the majority of these investments remain financed in equity.

The two men agree on a historical point. The volume invested in AI would already exceed that of the construction of American railways in the 19th century. Flattering comparison, except for one detail. The railway fever was shattered by the panic of 1873, triggered by the bankruptcy of the Jay Cooke bank, which financed the Northern Pacific on credit.

Machine-translated from French