Bitcoin and Ethereum gave back their gains, but has anything actually changed?
Bullish crypto momentum fizzled after Fed Chair Powell poured cold water on investors’ hopes that a positive CPI report would trigger a trend change, but higher time frames remain interesting. Crypto Markets threw a nice head fake this week by rallying into resistance on a “positive” Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, before retracing the majority of those gains right after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell took on a surprisingly hawkish tone during his post-rate-hike presser. The Fed hiked interest rates by 0.50%, which was well within the expectation of most market participants, but the eyebrow-raiser was the Federal Open Market Committee consensus that rates would need to reach the 5%–5.5%+ range in order to hopefully achieve the Fed’s 2% inflation target. This basically threw cold water on traders’ lusty dreams of a Fed policy pivot taking place in the first half of 2023, and the damper on sentiment was felt throughout crypto and equities markets. As the charts below show, Bit...