Wednesday's Market Minute: Bitcoin's Latest Narrative is Most Toxic To-Date

You have to hand it to the crypto crowd. Everything can go wrong, and they still manage to spin a story strong enough to convince a lot of people that everything's going according to plan. 

Actually, it's a disaster. Like laughably so. But coiners are rejoicing that bitcoin's back to its halfway mark.

They said it was money, but only if you like spending millions on pizza. They said it was an inflation hedge. As soon as inflation became an issue, bitcoin crashed. They called it digital gold. Gold crushed it when the economy actually got dicey. They said they wouldn't commit Wall Street's sins. Instead they produced the biggest scammers in a generation. They said regulation would be good. Instead, SBF’s on trial and Justin Sun is on the lam. They proclaimed, "institutional adoption is coming!" It did. Silvergate took crypto mainstream. Now it's gone. 

The biggest lie they've told is the most recent. They're falsely claiming Bitcoin uncoupled from the stock market the past month as a hedge to bank risk. Erroneous on both counts! Bitcoin’s correlation to the Nasdaq the past 30 days is 0.9, as high as ever. The only times this year the correlation broke was when crypto crashed after FTX, and then indeed, at the start of last month's run on California banks. Why? Because Bitcoin actually did worse – yes, worse! – the first week of March as the banks collapsed. Which makes sense, because crypto played a huge role in their demise. Coiners pushed the narrative that it was the bond market's fault, but that’s the literal opposite order of events. The Treasury reserves would've remained untouched if the banks' customers didn't burn through all their cash in crypto and tech.

And now, here we are, back at the drawing board: they're telling us the Fed is going to pivot. 

Guess what? It doesn't matter anymore. If the Fed does pivot, it's because the economy’s in serious trouble. That is just another form of tightening. And we know now – after more than a decade of festering in an economic petri dish literally designed to breed risk-taking appetite – that bitcoin is the first and hardest to fall when the going actually gets rough.

The only thing bitcoin is, and likely ever will be, is a barometer for risk-taking. How much are people willing to gamble. Right now they're feeling emboldened again. But the liquidity's not coming. As entertaining as the crypto story is, new money needs to come in to buy it. We'll likely never see that liquidity spigot flow as it did during COVID, which will make it extremely hard for bitcoin to reclaim those pandemic highs. More likely is that investors will see the latest narrative as yet another crypto promise made to be broken.

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