Stephen Gandel, Columnist

The Great Bank Bitcoin Divide

When your roots are in trading, it's hard to branch out.

October 2, 2017 at 7:15 PM UTC

Corrected

October 2, 2017 at 9:21 PM UTC

Stephen Gandel is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering banking and equity markets. He was previously a deputy digital editor for Fortune and an economics blogger at Time. He has also covered finance and the housing market.

1506968708_GettyImages-166307154 — Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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Bitcoin traders can breathe a sigh of relief. If JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s CEO Jamie Dimon fires them for trading the cybercurrency, Goldman Sachs Group could welcome them with open arms.

Goldman is reportedly considering a new operation dedicated to buying and selling digital currencies. Goldman would be the first large Wall Street firm to explicitly have a bitcoin trading desk, and the news seemed to legitimize the currency less than a month after Dimon called it a "fraud" and said that he would fire anyone stupid enough to trade it. Indeed, prices of bitcoin, which many people already thought were in a bubble, rose $193 on Monday to $4,365 each. That's up from $952 at the beginning of the year, for a staggering 360 percent return in 2017 alone. The S&P 500 is considered to be having a great year. It's up 15 percent, including dividends.