Bitcoin Soars Toward $100k As Treasury, Not Fed, Drives Liquidity

Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX and principal of Maelstrom Capital, contends that the US Treasury—somewhat than the Federal Reserve—is the true engine of the present bull market in danger property, Bitcoin foremost amongst them. Talking in a live-streamed one-on-one interview Wednesday night, Hayes argued that merchants ought to “ignore Powell” and as an alternative parse each phrase and knowledge desk that comes out of the Treasury’s quarterly refunding announcement.

“Powell hasn’t actually mattered for a few years,” Hayes insisted, dismissing the Fed chair’s resolution to go away the federal-funds charge at 4.25 % to 4.50 % for a 3rd consecutive assembly. “The true present is on the Treasury Division. […] Hearken to Bessent. Ignore Powell. He’s irrelevant.”

Hayes’s thesis rests on a liquidity dynamic that first surfaced within the third quarter of 2022. Then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, he mentioned, noticed “two-and-a-half trillion {dollars} of extra cash sitting within the Fed’s reverse repo facility” and shifted issuance towards short-dated Treasury payments. That maneuver, by Hayes’s calculation, siphoned dormant money out of the Fed and “injected it into the worldwide cash markets,” seeding a broad rally that lifted equities, bonds, gold and—most forcefully—crypto. “Powell didn’t matter in 2022 underneath a Democratic regime,” he mentioned. “He doesn’t matter immediately underneath the Republican regime.”

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s newly minted authority to conduct buybacks is, in Hayes’s view, the following accelerant. Buybacks would permit the Treasury to recycle on-the-run securities and take in provide shocks with out forcing the Fed to increase its steadiness sheet overtly. “Bessent has instruments,” Hayes famous, citing an April 11–12 Bloomberg look. “Powell will sit again and say ‘I’m going to have a look at knowledge,’ however he’s a sideshow.”

Bitcoin’s Macro Logic

Hayes reduces the buying and selling implications to a single variable: the amount of fiat {dollars} in circulation. “If there’s a greater amount of fiat {dollars} on the planet than there have been yesterday, Bitcoin and crypto will do effectively,” he mentioned. Value-stability debates, exchange-rate gyrations and even the trajectory of the US Greenback Index (DXY) are secondary. “Bitcoin doesn’t care. All we care about is: Is there extra {dollars} within the system immediately than yesterday?”
That framework underpins his long-running forecast that Bitcoin can attain $1 million earlier than 2028. The goal is intentionally spherical—“We’re people, we’re dumb, let’s simply choose a spherical quantity that’s massive”—but Hayes grounds it in compounding fiscal pressures.

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Curiosity on the US nationwide debt was the fastest-growing line merchandise in the newest Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee presentation; Social Safety, Medicare and protection prices, he argued, will solely push borrowing wants larger. “There’s simply no means the US authorities goes to cease spending cash,” he mentioned, including that he expects “an acceleration of cash printing and financial debasement” as soon as Powell’s time period expires in Might 2026.

Requested how he’s allocating capital, Hayes mentioned about 60%–65% of his liquid portfolio is in Bitcoin, 20% in Ether, with the rest in a handful of what he known as “high quality shitcoins.” He highlighted three tasks—Pendle, EtherFi and Ethena—as examples of what he calls “basic season,” protocols that generate actual income and share it with token-holders.

The timing of a broader rotation into altcoins, he added, will rely on Bitcoin dominance. “I feel we have to get above 70% earlier than we begin seeing a rotation again into alts,” a threshold he tentatively locations within the $110,000–$150,000 BTC worth vary.

Hayes was skeptical that the US–China tariff confrontation will meaningfully shrink the bilateral commerce hole. Either side, he mentioned, want a “face-saving announcement” for home audiences, however the USA will proceed importing Chinese language items, whether or not instantly or by way of third-countries. Over time, he expects Washington to rely much less on tariffs and extra on capital-account measures—comparable to consumer charges on Treasuries held by foreigners—to re-engineer commerce flows with out asking US customers to “purchase much less stuff.”

A weaker greenback, in his mannequin, is a by-product of these changes, not a centrally deliberate goal. “If foreigners promote much less issues in {dollars} and people {dollars} should not invested within the monetary markets, the greenback will go down in worth,” he mentioned. That, once more, feeds the Bitcoin bid.

At press time, BTC traded at $98,827.

Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com