Legendary investor Mark Mobius says the Fed will hike interest rates as high as 9% if inflation stays high

• The Federal Reserve could hike interest rates as high as 9% according to Mark Mobius.
• Mobius told Bloomberg TV Wednesday that the Fed believes it has to hike past the inflation rate.

The Federal Reserve could hike interest rates as high as 9%, according to Mark Mobius.

The famed investor told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday that because inflation had remained persistently high, "the Fed has to raise interest rates higher than inflation in order to kill inflation."

Mobius made similar comments on CNBC's "Squawk Box" earlier in the day, when he posited that the central bank could increase benchmark rates by 100 to 200 basis points, or 1 to 2 percentage points, at each meeting to try to get past the rate of inflation.

Mobius' comments come a day after the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst rout in roughly two years on the heels of the latest consumer-price-index reading. Headline inflation pulled back slightly year over year to 8.3% after climbing to 9.1% in July.

Mobius also touched on cryptocurrencies, which he says the central bank is ignoring at its peril.

"People at the policymaking level are not paying attention to the cryptocurrencies, which results in trillions of dollars in turnover," he said.

He added that while crypto wasn't as large of a focus compared with the monetary supply, digital assets were "having a wealth effect on many many people." He said he viewed bitcoin in particular as a major indicator of where markets would go in the future.