With much of the world celebrating Christmas, bitcoin (BTC) quietly appeared set to reclaim the $100,000 level after dipping below $93,000 before the holiday.
The rally, however, stopped just above $99,800 as Asia opened for business on Thursday morning and quickly fell to around $95,000 just hours later.
Bitcoin at press time is trading at $95,300, down 3.1% over the past 24 hours.
The wider CoinDesk Index 20 was down 4.2% in the same time frame, with ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA and AVAX among the cryptos in that gauge with 4%-7% losses.
US markets open on Thursday, and stock index futures point to modest early losses; gold and oil are slightly in the green.
Crypto price action over the past 48 hours has certainly been in very low volume and bitcoin has still doubled year-to-date, but perhaps the overlooked declines over the past week are the tailwind of lower rates of interest may have been a headwind.
The 10-year Treasury yield continued to climb higher 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 benchmark short-term rates by 50 basis points in September.
Macro researcher Jim Bianco said that rapid upward move in long-term rates following a Fed rate cut is almost unprecedented in modern financial history. “The bond market will continue to sell (higher yields) when the Fed talks more about rate cuts in 2025,” Bianco said. “If the Fed doesn’t back off on the rate-cutting talk, bond yields are going to be as high as they need to be to start breaking things, to break inflation.”
