With most of the globe celebrating Christmas, bitcoin (BTC) looked quietly poised to retake the $100,000 level after falling below $93,000 just before the holiday.
The rally, however, settled to just over $99,800 as Asia opened for business on Thursday morning and quickly declined to around $95,000 just a few hours later.
Bitcoin at press time was trading at $95,300, down 3.1% in the last 24 hours.
The widest CoinDesk 20 Index it was lower by 4.2% over the same period, with ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA and AVAX among the cryptos in that gauge sporting 4%-7% losses.
US markets opened on Thursday, and stock index futures indicated modest anticipated losses; gold and oil are marginally in the green.
Crypto price action over the last 48 hours is certainly in very low volume and bitcoin has also more than doubled year to date, but perhaps overlooked in last week’s declines is that the wind tailwind of lower interest rates could become a headwind.
The 10-year Treasury yield continued to fall early Thursday, now at 4.63% and within a few basis points of its 2024 high. The yield is now ahead by nearly 100 basis points since the Federal Reserve cut short-term benchmark rates by 50 basis points in September.
Macro researcher Jim Bianco noticed that the rapid rise in long-term rates following a Fed rate cut is almost unprecedented in modern monetary history. “The bond market will continue to sell (higher yields) as the Fed talks about rate cuts in 2025,” Bianco said. “If the Fed does not postpone the talk of cutting rates, bond yields will go as far as necessary to start breaking things, to break inflation.”
