- Bitcoin and crypto could come crashing down if the Fed continues to raise interest rates to tame inflation, warns billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya.
- Palihapitiya predicts a worst-case scenario where the Fed could continue to raise interest rates till 2025.
Although Bitcoin (BTC) made a move closer to $21,000 last week, it has come under selling pressure over the weekend. The border market has been reacting negatively to the growing concerns of Binance selling half a billion dollars worth of FTT tokens.
As of press time, Bitcoin is trading 2.43 percent down at a price of $20,720 and a market cap of $397 billion. However, amid the current macro set up billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya has issued a warning to investors while expecting a major crash in the global markets.
In his latest interview Palihapitiya said that Fed looks determined to crush the demand to control soaring inflation. He was basically referring to stronger chances of continued interest rate hikes by the Fed in the coming months. As a result, investors need to buckle up now, said the billionaire in the latest episode of All-In Podcast. Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya added:
If you take a very balanced view of what happened this week, you have to start, I think, with the Federal Reserve and really what they said is rates will probably be higher than all of you think, and they’ll be higher for longer than all of you want.
Without debating whether that’s going to come to pass or not, the thing that you can do is you can build a little sensitivity model to understand the mathematical implication of it. Basically, what it means is that the dollar that’s right in front of you is now meaningfully more important than the dollar that’s far, far away from you.
Crash in Bitcoin and crypto market
Considering that Bitcoin has been sharing a greater correlation with the S&P500, any uneventful situation on Wall Street could lead to a major crash in the crypto markets. A higher interest rate is traditionally bearish for risk-ON and volatile assets like equity and crypto.
This is because, with higher interest rates, it costs more to borrow capital, resulting in the flow of money to the U.S. Dollar. Last week itself, the Fed raised interest rates by 75 basis points for the fourth consecutive time. This has led to the benchmark federal fund rates reaching 3.75 percent to 4 percent. Investors have been expecting that the interest rates would top 4.75 percent by the next year.
But Palihapitiya asks investors to be prepared for a scenario where the Fed could continue to raise rates up to 2025. The billionaire added:
It’s just getting much, much, much harder than I even thought. For me, I’m like, ‘Wow, I thought that we could get through the worst of this by mid-2023.’ But now, you have to plan for the worst, which means, okay now I’m thinking, ‘Man, rates could be higher for much longer, which means we could be in this market until early 2025. Hey, that’s way too conservative.’ But you have to plan for conservatism at this point.
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