Author: Babywhale, Techub News
This morning, Bitcoin once again reached the $80,000 mark, and has rebounded to above $82,500 at the time of writing. The weekend's decline has also left a huge gap on the CME Bitcoin futures chart, just like last Monday.
According to Coinglass data, as of the time of writing, about $621 million in positions were liquidated across the network in the past 24 hours. Among them, about $240 million in Bitcoin contracts were liquidated, $108 million in Ethereum contracts, $30 million in XRP contracts, and over $26 million in SOL contracts. The largest single liquidation occurred on Binance, exceeding $30 million.
Reserve policy falls short of expectations, macroeconomic uncertainty rises rapidly
The much-anticipated Bitcoin reserve plan has brought almost no good news in recent times.
On the one hand, the Bitcoin Reserve Act signed by Trump clearly stated that the bulk of the reserves come from the approximately 200,000 Bitcoins previously held by the US government, and additional Bitcoin purchases would require a "budget-neutral" approach, meaning that even if additional Bitcoin is purchased, the fiscal burden cannot be increased. Many speculate that the government may choose to sell some assets to buy additional Bitcoin.
Standard Chartered Bank said the US government could choose to sell gold to buy Bitcoin, but "crypto czar" David Sacks later denied this. In the author's view, additional Bitcoin purchases are an extremely difficult operation for the US, and for a government that has already cut a large amount of unnecessary budget in the name of a savior, buying a risk asset that can fluctuate more than 10% in a single day is hard to convince the public. For those of us in the industry, Bitcoin is well known, but for the general public, not everyone accepts crypto assets.
In addition to the fact that the national-level Bitcoin reserves have not seen the crazy buying frenzy that many optimists predicted, the progress of state-level Bitcoin reserve bills has also encountered setbacks.
So far, several states, including Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, have rejected Bitcoin reserve bills, and while Utah has passed the HB230 "Blockchain and Digital Innovation Amendments" bill, the provision authorizing the state treasurer to invest in Bitcoin has been removed.
Of course, the relevant bills in many states have reached the verge of passage, but we can also draw some conclusions from the existing situation: the "nationwide Bitcoin buying frenzy" that many practitioners have been looking forward to is unlikely to happen, and lawmakers have also maintained a clear mind, and it is indeed difficult to convince the public to buy high-risk assets with real money in the short term.
On the macroeconomic front, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have lowered their growth rate forecasts for US GDP in 2025, with the former lowering the growth forecast from the previous 1.9% to 1.5%, and the latter lowering the figure from 2.2% to 1.7%, and raising the probability of an economic recession from 15% to 20%.
In fact, the efforts made by Trump, including raising tariffs and reducing unnecessary spending, are essentially beneficial to the sustainable development of the US in the long run, but in the short term, they are inevitable to cause rising inflation, rising unemployment, and weakening of the US dollar hegemony. In the author's view, the current financial market is facing an extremely delicate situation: on the one hand, the inflation caused by tariffs may further impact the US economy, forcing the Fed to cut interest rates at some point; on the other hand, if the economy is resilient enough, a hasty rate cut may further push up inflation.
In this way, Trump's "grand strategy" that he is so proud of may lead to an insoluble vicious cycle, which may be the main reason why analysts predict that the US will experience a recession. The author has a groundless guess that many of the wealthy classes in the world today have actually become seriously disconnected from the lives of ordinary people, and their perceived short-term "pains" may ruin a considerable part of the lives of the lower classes, and this "why not eat meat and rice" mentality is also an important source of much of the uncertainty.
For risk assets, definite bad news is even better than uncertainty, and the simultaneous rise of gold, US stocks and the US dollar over the past year is the most obvious sign of capital seeking certainty, while the recent decline in US stocks and the US dollar means that the last safe haven of the risk market, the US, no longer has certainty, and the rise of Hong Kong stocks and A-shares also follows the same logic. But given that Bitcoin has to some extent become part of the US stock market since the launch of the spot ETF, the author still needs to remind investors to be prepared for the tsunami caused by the flapping of the butterfly's wings, at least in the first half of this year.
