Cryptocurrencies have become the subject of serious debate over the last several years. But a new set of reports warns they could bring down financial markets in the same way the subprime mortgage crisis caused the Great Recession more than 15 years ago.

Entwining larger digital assets like Bitcoin with traditional markets could set off a ripple effect where consumers begin taking out loans in larger amounts to finance risky cryptocurrency bets, a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests. The process is called “leveraged trading,” which consists of a crypto owner trading with borrowed capital from a broker to enhance buying power.

Such digital assets are not associated with any government controls or regulations, potentially leading to huge price swings and volatility. Many Americans lost their life savings dabbling in these markets in recent years, but most of those losses were contained to niche areas of a largely unregulated sector of the economy.

“The use of leverage by crypto investors appears widespread, amplifying investors’ exposure to shocks to crypto-asset prices and the feedback loop between leverage and crypto-asset prices,” the economists wrote in the report. “If enough people begin investing in those firms, it could put substantial strain on household budgets, leading to higher delinquency rates,” they argue.

New accounts for trading Bitcoin rose 26% in the 10 days after President-elect Donald Trump won the election last month, The Washington Post reported in November. During his presidential campaign, Trump promised to become a major supporter of cryptocurrencies.

Trump reiterated his plans earlier this week to create a U.S. bitcoin strategic reserve as the valuation of the gold standard digital coin breezed past $100,000. Analysts worry that going that route would effectively tether crypto into the wider U.S. economy at the expense of smaller crypto owners.

As of 2021, the top 10,000 Bitcoin investors owned a combined 5 million coins, a lion’s share of the overall number of Bitcoin in the market, according to a study that year by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Participation in Bitcoin is still very skewed toward a few top players even at the end of 2020,” finance experts Igor Makarov and Antoinette Schoar said in their report.

Another report from the Office of Financial Reserve, which reports to the Treasury Department, made similar findings. Zip codes with the highest levels of cryptocurrency holders saw spikes in households taking out more mortgage loans, according to that November 26 report.

The uptick in the use of crypto assets for other types of loans “could present a financial stability risk if there are spillovers onto household balance sheets or sectors in the real economy,” researchers wrote in that report. Federal banking regulators should focus on low-income consumers with high debt and crypto holdings, the researchers added.

Reports warning about a larger possible contagion come on the heels of research showing extreme financial anxiety among younger generations.

Americans born between 1997 and 2012 — known as Generation Z — said they would need to make more than $587,000 a year to be financially successful, a new survey by financial services company Empower found. That’s almost nine times the average salary in the U.S., according to the Social Security Administration.

The first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was mined during the Great Recession and promoted as a decentralized solution for money.

But ever since, policymakers and financial analysts have dismissed this claim.

“People are not using it as a form of payment, or as a store of value,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told CNBC recently. Cryptocurrencies are not an alternative to the U.S. dollar so much as “a competitor for gold,” he added.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has made similar comments in the past.

He called Bitcoin a “Ponzi scheme” in an April interview with Bloomberg TV, adding that he’s always said “it’s a fraud.” Dimon cited cyber criminals and drug cartels who prefer using digital currencies as forms of payment from their victims because there are no regulatory safeguards for customers.

People who own Bitcoin and other forms of digital coins are not refunded when a crypto exchange collapses in the same way depositors are at banks.

Economists in the Federal Reserve of New York report cited the 2023 case of stablecoin Tether, which is a crypto asset backed by the U.S. dollar, as a problem spot. It was backed by “risky assets, such as corporate bonds, precious metals, Bitcoin and secured loans,” which made “Tether riskier than most prime money market funds,” they noted.

A contagion in the money market funds contributed to the 2008 collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Have a news tip? Contact Christopher White at cdwhite@sbgtv.com.