Bitcoin Price Recovers on Biden’s Optimism the Fed Will Lower Rates ‘This Year’ – Decrypt

Bitcoin has staged a mini-recovery after U.S. President Joe Biden expressed optimism over the chances of a rate cut this year.

Following yesterday’s hotter-than-hoped-for CPI report numbers, which showed inflation holding at 3.5% in March, Biden said he expected to see a rate cut before the end of the year.

Speaking at a press conference in Japan, Biden said, “I do stand by my prediction that before the year is out, there’ll be a rate cut. This may delay it a month or so, I’m not sure of that.”

He added that, “We don’t know what the Fed is going to do for certain, but look, we have dramatically reduced inflation from 9% down to close to 3%.”

Per data from CoinGecko, the price of Bitcoin is currently trading at around $70,800, up 2.5% on the day, after dipping yesterday following the CPI report.

The wider crypto market rose in lockstep with Bitcoin, with the market cap of all cryptocurrencies up 2.3% to $2.77 trillion, and the top 10 cryptocurrencies (barring stablecoins) all in the green over the past 24 hours. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, rose 1.9% to just under $3,600.

While inflation rates remain high, the U.S. Federal Reserve shies away from cutting federal interest rates—which, in turn, tends to drive investors to traditional safe havens such as treasury bonds, rather than more volatile assets such as crypto and stocks.

Yesterday also saw a reversal of recent Bitcoin ETF outflows, with $123.7 million entering the exchange-traded products. Grayscale’s GBTC saw its lowest day of outflows, with just $17.5 million exiting the fund, after the firm’s CEO Michael Sonnenshein claimed that outflows from GBTC were approaching “equilibrium.”

Edited by Stacy Elliott.