Weekly Crypto Digest: Bitcoin parries 75 basis point interest rate hike ECB

The attached overview from Coin360 illustrates the development of the crypto market over the past 7 days. The total crypto market cap stabilized over the past week and currently stands at $984 billion and now has more than 20,900 coins.

Bitcoin’s market dominance continued to decline to 37.6%. Bitcoin’s market cap decreased 3% to at $370 billion. In contrast, the market dominance of Ethereum (ETH) picked up to 20.4%, with Ethereum’s market cap picking up $201 billion.

Bitcoin bucks rate hike of ECB with 75 basispoints

The crypto market led by Bitcoin was under pressure again this past week. Bitcoin once again did not have a good week and saw its price drop further below $20,000.

The past few weeks were dominated by the annual Jackson Hole Symposium in America where the Central Bankers of America met.

This week it was the turn of the European Central (Bad) Bank or ECB. The ECB is currently headed by a bureaucratic politician named Christine Lagarde and was forced to step on the interest rate brake to curb the out-of-control inflation.

Lagarde at once raised the interest rate by 75 basis points from 0% to 0.75%, which meant the biggest interest rate increase since the introduction of the ‘hard’ euro in 1999.

In itself, this interest rate hike may sound large, but if you look at it from a distance it is not so bad. The European Central Bank has made a mess of things in recent decades by opening the money tap wide while lowering interest rates to well below zero.

The big winners are (weak) governments and banks, with the bill being passed on to the citizens who dutifully pay their taxes.

The market was afraid that the equity markets and, in its wake, the crypto market would come under further pressure following the ECB’s interest rate hike. That wasn’t too bad. Bitcoin held up well and did not drop significantly further and consolidated around $19,000.
This is obviously a positive sign. Now it remains to be seen whether this is enough for the crypto market to push further towards the $1,000 billion mark or higher.