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(Bloomberg) -- Cryptocurrency prices extended their slide on Monday as escalating tariff war tensions and diminishing prospects of further Federal Reserve rate cuts offset a wave of pro-crypto announcements from President Donald Trump last week.
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Risk assets like crypto have been under pressure since the US Fed signalled a pause in rate cuts in mid-December. Adding to the uncertainty, Friday’s labor data showed US unemployment stood at 4.1%, up from 4% last month.
Bitcoin fell as much as 3.7% early on Monday and later pared some of its losses to trade at $82,568 as of 11:30 in London.
“A large spike in ‘underemployment’ to 5 year highs has added fuel to recession fears and driven yields lower as rate cuts were pushed forward into early summer,” said Augustine Fan, a partner at crypto derivatives software provider SignalPlus.
Trump’s crypto-friendly stance, including an executive order to create a US Bitcoin reserve and a separate stockpile of other tokens, along with a high-profile summit with industry executives in Washington, has done little to lift market sentiment. While the administration pledged to capitalize the reserve with crypto seized in legal proceedings, the absence of fresh capital commitments disappointed investors.
“The market perceived the summit as underwhelming and top cryptocurrencies dropped after it was revealed that the widely anticipated crypto reserve would only hold existing government holdings,” said Jeff Mei, chief operating officer at crypto exchange BTSE.
The US currently owns about $17 billion worth of Bitcoin and about $400 million worth of several other tokens, largely attributable to asset forfeitures related to civil and criminal cases.
Investors are rationally more bullish on crypto given recent developments like the reduced US Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement, but other factors are more nuanced or even negative, said Ari Paul, co-founder of BlockTower Capital.
“The apparent capricious favoritism in the administration’s selection of assets for the strategic reserve — especially after the launching of Trump and Melania coins — is a strong deterrent to investors,” Paul said in a message. “It’s created the impression that the Trump administration is engaged in lobbying based selection and promotion of ‘insider’ assets, and that the cryptocurrency market today is largely a short-term trading casino,” he added.
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