Bitcoin slides to $68K as traders eye Fed minutes
Markets painted red across the board Monday. Fed minutes and inflation data loom large this week.
Scout Team
The market's doing something interesting today, and by interesting I mean painful. Bitcoin just took a nosedive to $68,000, dragging pretty much everything else down with it.
So what's spooking traders? Honestly, it's the same old macro fears. We've got Fed minutes dropping this week, plus the core PCE inflation report - you know, the Fed's favorite inflation gauge. Traders are basically holding their breath, waiting to see if Jerome Powell and crew are thinking about another rate hike.
Here's what strikes me: $68,000 for bitcoin still sounds wild when you zoom out. Remember when we were celebrating $20K back in 2020? But context matters, and right now that drop from recent highs has folks nervous. The whole crypto market cap shed about $150 billion in the last 24 hours. Ouch.
Look, heavy macro weeks like this always make crypto jumpy. The correlation with traditional markets is still annoyingly high in 2026, despite all the "digital gold" narratives. When traders get spooked about interest rates, risk assets bleed first. Crypto, being the riskiest of risk assets, tends to bleed hardest.
What happens next probably depends on those Fed minutes. If they sound hawkish, expect more pain. But if inflation data comes in cooler than expected? That could flip the script pretty quickly. For now though, the bears are definitely having their moment.