Were you here for thanksgoing?
I was working.
You're working naturally giving all of this markets man Viz. Bloomberg News Executive editor Stacy Marie Schmaiel worked through the holiday last week. A lot of her work in the newsroom involves tracking one of the most volatile markets around, crypto, and the last few weeks have been a roller coaster.
The market is eyeing quite nervously. The lows that we saw over the past couple of weeks pretty pronounced selov in bitcoin yesterday, today's stabilizing.
Back in October, bitcoin reached a record high Bitcoin more than doubling in value over the past year.
Look at this, you're to date of thirty percent, hitting a fresh record.
But just a few weeks later, its price had plunged, taking out over one trillion dollars in crypto assets along with it. On Tuesday, it rallied. It was back above ninety thousand dollars. That's left investors and analysts wondering what to make of these dramatic swings.
I don't think the pain is over for crypto.
There's a selloff, there's always the risk that it accelerates beyond what a reasonable person might expect. Or when there is a sudden recovery and people are like, why is that happening? Nobody really has a good answer.
So was the latest crypto selloff a wake up call or just par for the chorus for a volatile market? I'm David Gera and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today. On the show What just happened to the Crypto Market and What can it tell us about Crypto's future? Stacy Marie Ishmael has been tracking the crypto market swings closely. Bitcoin is down almost thirty percent from its October high, but she says it's important to put that in context.
We're only really down like ten percent on the year, which, depending on how you look at the chart, some people are either having a very good year or a very bad one, and that really, to me is part of the story of this asset class. Right. Cryptocurrencies are volatile by nature. They have long been perceived as a risk asset. They trade in ways that have been described as chaotic.
They don't have kind of necessarily predictable patterns because people aren't able to do like corporate cash flow analysis or whatever those things are. So when there's a sell off, there's always the risk that it accelerates beyond what a reasonable person might expect, or when there is a sudden recovery and people are like, why is that happening? Nobody really has a good answer, And that's pretty much what's been going on for the past two months.
You and your team have been watching all of this unfold. It ruined your Thanksgiving holiday. At this point, what can you tell us about why it happened, Why we saw bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fall from those sides of just a couple weeks ago.
I can tell you what people are telling us. Okay, so the first thing is going back to this idea of bitcoin being a risk asset. What are the things that are supportive of risk assets? A low interest rate environment, you know, the idea that policies will be accommodating to people having lots of money to spend on things. And the very second you have a concern that, say, the Fed is not going to lower interest rates as quickly as people hope they might, then folks start to get
a little bit more conservative about their positioning. A couple of days ago, there was some comments from the Bank of Japan suggesting that interest rates there might be increasing,
and that had some spillover effect. There's also people who associate crypto in general, will bitcoin very specifically with the fortunes of the Trump White House and its policies are on crypto because Trump was when he was inaugurated, you know, some of his very first executive orders were perceived as being very supportive of cryptocurrencies.
I pledged that we would bring back American liberty and leadership and make the United States to crypto capital of the world, and that's what we've done.
There was this idea of establishing a bitcoin reserve. If you talk to various people in the industry, they might say things like, well, you know, legislation hasn't moved as quickly as we would like, we're not seeing as many changes as we want, or yes, we got those things, but you know what else is going to come? Like,
is there anything else that they're going to do? So all in all, it's been an environment in which there are not a lot of reasons for people to buy with high conviction, but there have been a lot of reasons for people to sell.
You having lived through downturns in the crypto market before, does it feel familiar? Does it feel different. We've know that crypto winter from a couple of years back. Does it feel eaerily similar?
The former CEO of failed crypto firm FTX, Sam Bankman Freed, has been arrested in the Bahamas at the request of the US government. Just how long is.
Winter going to ask and how cold is it going to get? Like how much lower is Bigfooring going to go?
Well, nobody has filed for bankruptcy, which is a big, big difference from that time around. And we haven't seen anybody arrested in the Bahamas and you know, taken taken into custody. So there are very many elements of this that are different. And in addition to a much more shall we say, explicitly constructive policy environment, we also have
the fact that the market structure is different. You know, cryptoetfs didn't exist in twenty twenty two, and to an extent they have provided almost an institutional floor because so many retail investors are interested in these things, they have
them in their four oh one case. We have on the other side this idea of the digital Ashet Treasury Company, which kind of existed with micro strategy now called Strategy, but now you have various other companies that used to be like e commerce firms saying we want to pivot and hold bitcoin as our balance sheet strategy. So I think it's hard to draw an immediate like for like
comparison to what was happening in twenty twenty two. But I would say until we start to see like real, this feeling of panic selling as opposed to this kind of steady burn, then we're still in a very different environment.
Let me stick with those ETFs because it sort of lent a level of legitimacy to this market that didn't have before. Beyond that sort of how has it shaped the way that this market reacts? Having what about a dozen of these ETFs, now more than that.
Forgive me so many more. Our analysts and Bloomberg Intelligence have a very long spreadsheets of all the different out style ETFs. Yeah, there's Bitcoin, but there's also like doge coin and ripple and other things.
Do they buffet the market?
Not all of them are very popular. So you know, the biggest one by far, which does have a very significant number of assets is ibit, which is from black Rock. But one of the things that ETFs have done is introduced a wider range of people to the idea of having exposure to crypto as an asset class, which is
just a different way of thinking about size. Right. Yeah, you still have to be the kind of person who thinks about what you want near four oh one k and haves like some contact with the financial advisor generally speaking. But you know, if you didn't want to have to figure out like how to set up a crypotal wallet, how to buy bitcoin directly, what's the stable coin? Now you can just be like, oh, this can diversify my portfolio.
And that was really seen by the industry as a huge step in that legitimacy that you're describing, on.
That pathway to normalization or legitimization. A Vanguard, second largest asset manager, this week announcing that its customers can trade ATF's mutual funds that crypto heavy on their platform. How big a moment is is that in the evolution of this asset class.
From a narrative perspective, enormous from a didn't have any major consequences in the crypto price like kind of I will say that, you know, they have been the last really big holdout. A lot of people have been just waiting for the moment in which they would say yes. And of course this comes after, you know, they have a new CEO who comes from the world of crypto ETFs was like part of the team responsible for driving
forward ibit that we just mentioned. So I think that was kind of one of those things where the news was not so much that it happened, just that it happened this week because it was one of those things that people were very much expecting.
This is a risk asset class. Risky asset class, I should say as well, and we've seen what nineteen billion dollars of leverage bets wiped out over the course of this sell off. Explain exactly what that means instic terms.
Imagine you could, you know, take a position on something, but you do it by borrowing money. So you're like, oh, I want to make a five dollar bet, so I'm going to borrow five dollars, So you don't actually have five dollars. You've borrowed five dollars, and if that bet goes in your favor like fantastic, like now you have like five, possibly ten dollars depending on how it structured. If that bet moves against you, now you owe money that you didn't have any first place. Don't come for me.
That's a wild verse implications of how these things work. But generally, it's this idea of people putting up capital that is, in fact more than they can necessarily comfortably repay because they were expecting prices to move in a particular direction and actually those prices moved against them.
What does that tell you about this market? That there is a there has been a hearty appetite for risk of confidence that it's yeah.
I mean, it just goes back to that idea of risk assets, right, And for a good chunk of this year, it was like the narrative was like, you know, Crypto's back, Bitcoin is back. The entire environment is supportive of it. So the shift in October where we saw what we thought was like initially kind of a flash crash because it was very sudden and very aggressive, but the market hasn't been able to come back from that, and that is I think indicative that there might be some repricing
towards a lower level. Right, So if the bulls we're expecting we enter twenty twenty six at anywhere from one fifty to one million, depending on how ambitious you are we're you know, we're kind of closer to ninety right now, and that may be where we end December.
I think there's a tendency to focus on Bitcoin, the og cryptoer the biggest. Has the selloff been across the board all cryptocurrencies wrapped up in it, or if there be any standouts that haven't been affected.
I wouldn't say anybody hasn't been affected. I will say some things have been hit harder than others. So at the very very risky, highly speculative end of the market, you have like the meme coins, right, which are in the name it's like based around memes. But there have been two very high profile meme coin launches this year, one named after the President and one named after the first Lady, and those have been hammered to an extent that is in a lot of ways like more intense
than we've seen in other corners of the market. And we've also seen kind of a similar effect on other Trump family related crypto properties. Right, We've been tracking the decline in the shares of American Bitcoin, which is a cryptomning currency associated with Trump, and so it does feel like there is something different that is happening with the kind of the Trump family crypto portfolio as opposed to the wider market.
Coming up, how Trump and his family continue to influence the crypto market, and Stacy, Marie and I dig into what the president's attempts to prop up the market could mean for its future. It seems like a lot of the enthusiasm or wider embrace of crypto was brought about by the Trumps and the Trump administration taking a different tack toward digital assets.
A fair way to.
Say that with today's signing, the future of crypto and the crypto industry, the US dollar working together because they really are hand in hand, is going to be stronger and bigger and better than ever before.
Can you just explain sort of what that's meant in real terms? So we see regulators that are acting maybe as muscularly as they did during the Biden administration, but beyond that sort of what has that change in approach meant for the industry as a whole.
I think from the industry perspective, sometimes people will say it was like, oh, act first, apologize after they're just acting, because there isn't even a need to apologize, right, There isn't a fear or a concern that someone will launch something, do something, try something, and they'll immediately be confronted with like a Wells notice or you know, a regulator being
like just a reminder about prudential regulation. So it certainly has liberated I would think the approach of the industry in terms of how quickly they want to launch products, how risky those products can be. Like one of the big things that we certainly sow in twenty twenty five is, you know, if you're a crypto company or a fintech with any kind of crypto releasing thing, you're like, I want to ipo, I want to raise money, I want to get engaged in M and A. Because it's like
this perception was like we have a window. We don't know how long this window will be open for, but we're going to take full advantage.
Can you describe the contours of the galaxy of digital asset involvement this president and his family have. So you mentioned American bitcoin, this bitcoin mining company, the Trump mean coin, the Milennia meme coin. How expansive is it.
It's very wide ranging, and I think that it's also not necessarily visible all the time because like Trump media for instance, which runs the Truth social platform, the messaging platform choice of the President has arrangements with crypto companies, famously one called crypto dot com to investigate the launches
of like crypto related ETFs. They're doing things like potentially getting into prediction markets, which is different from crypto proper, but I would say ideologically similar in that it's another mechanism through which people can take different approaches or entry
points into the financial system. Then you know, you have the World Liberty Financial of which Trump the President is listed as like the sort of emeritus member of it, but which is largely run day to day by other parts of the family, which is working on a stable coin. They have described themselves as you know, a DeFi, a decentralized financial platform. So I would say, lots of pies,
lots of fingers in those pies. Not necessarily a lot of specific economic activity that we can yet point to, but we're certainly paying attention.
How big a deal is the Trump family as kind of a hype machine in this space. So I saw that Eric Trump was interviewed by Bloomberg News in November commenting on this dip, and he said, what a great buying opportunity.
With crypto comes volatility. Volatility is our friend. Volatility is something that should be harnessed, right, and so I think bitcoin is going to continue to massively overperform the markets.
Does that make a difference when you have a family that is so heavily invested in this space saying something like that, is it encouraging others? Is it effectively encouraging other people?
To the presidents in the family and everyone associated has been very explicit repeatedly that there are no conflicts of interest to be found anywhere in any of this involvement. At the same time, they have been very high profile, very visible, very public, explicit exponents of the values of from parts of this ecosystem, whether from their own personal investments or you know, one or more of the Trump sons effectively attending like every cryptoconference of note to talk
up digital assets. And then you have other high profile members of the administration, including Howard Lutnik, who you know, his family firm Cantor Fitzgerald very famously was kind of I think responsible for the turning point in the perception of Tether, the world's largest table coin company, because you know, Lutnick came out a couple of years ago and said, like, tether has the money that it says it has, and that just changed the game entirely for Tether, and they're
now seeking to raise quite a lot of money at a very you know, spacexy open Ai type valuation. So I wouldn't say that there is no effect. It's just not always that the effect is like as direct as folks might make it out to be.
How do you see these assets in kind of the broader sweep? I remember when there was a lot of talk about it being an inflation hedge. Now we've kind of seen it move in concert with risk your tech stocks. What can digital assets tell us about the overall market?
I will once again tell you what people say. Certainly there's an idea that it is an inflation hedge. You know, one bitcoin is one bitcoin is the phrase that sometimes use.
I do think because bitcoin trades twenty four to seven and crypto trades twenty four seven, and it's a market that's open when other markets are closed, it sometimes acts like a future's market, right that if something happens in the world that people are either bearish or bullish on, we will often see a move in crypto that doesn't feel like cryptospecific, but more like, oh, this is open and I can trade it. I'm going to do that
and then other markets catch up. That is absolutely a phenomenon that is well established, it's been happening for a while. There's real things that are going on there. But I do think a third is just this general like risk and sentiment barometer, because it's the kind of thing for a lot of people where it's not a core part of your portfolio. Yes, there are hedge funds that are
entirely dedicated to digital assets. You can definitely find a financial advisor who's like, you're ready, five sure, put all your money in bitcoin. That is a thing that exists, but for a majority of investment professionals, it's the kind of thing where you're like, this is an interesting place to diversify, and if the rest of your portfolio is
underperforming and crypto is doing well, fantastic. But if crypto isn't doing well, you might ask, Okay, well should I put my money in gold or in silver or something else where you might be seeing better and more immediate returns.
Uniqueness of this space, this asset classes things can turn around.
Pretty quickly tomorrow, it might be right, we're.
Seeing Bitcoin climb higher and Cardana and ether. What does history tell us about the way rebounds work with cryptocurrencies? What makes them stay? What makes it not just an anomals blip where we see them going up after a huge sell off. What tends to give them staying power? And how do you think about that in the context of this particular sell off.
One of the things that I do in the Bloomberg terminal is there's a function that lets you like look at news events versus prices on a chart, and I spend a lot of time staring at that trying to figure out, Okay, like what has been driving in crypto. And it is true that really significant actions that prop
up a certain narrative have helped rallies in the past. Right, So you know in July of last year, when you know, Donald Trump goes to a conference for the bitcoin faithful and says like I want to make the United States the bitcoin capital of the world, that absolutely precipitated a run up that you know kind of peaked for a while in January, or you know, going back two years when like bitcoin ETFs were approved, or on the other side,
when Sam Backwinfried got arrested and FTX collapsed and we're like, hah, that doesn't seem good. So right now, what's missing is this like single thing? So people are like, oh, is it going to be the vanguard announcement about ETFs? Is it going to be you know, whoever replaces Dero Powers? Yeah, And we just haven't seen a big capitalist and we're sort of running out of days this year for something really big to happen.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gerat. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow