Key Takeaways
- Treasury doubled bond buybacks to $4B, triggering a bitcoin rally from under $65K to over $71K.
- Peter Schiff dismissed bitcoin’s surge as a “fakeout,” urging investors to sell crypto and buy gold instead.
- Schiff warned buybacks won’t stop rising yields, predicting the Fed will need to launch a new QE program.
Economist Peter Schiff Labels Bitcoin’s Surge over $72K as a Fakeout
As bitcoin has once again become relevant in international capital markets, its critics have jumped to point out the problems behind this recent price breakout.
Peter Schiff, a longtime gold bug and bitcoin critic, explained that this price movement was nothing more than a “fakeout,” as investors rushed to position liquidity in assets after the debt buyback announcement left the markets disoriented.
“Bitcoin’s rally above $72K is a fakeout, not a breakout. The Treasury buyback announcement caught markets by surprise,” Schiff declared.
The Treasury’s move, doubling the size of its buybacks to $4 billion per operation to improve liquidity and indirectly lower yields, made bitcoin rally from sub-$65,000 to over $71,000 at the time of writing, breaking a period of relative price stagnation.
“Bitcoin investors have long believed a return to easy money would be the catalyst for gold and Bitcoin to soar. They are only half right. Sell Bitcoin, buy gold,” Schiff assessed, promoting the precious metal over its digital counterpart.
Nonetheless, he stressed that the Treasury buyback announcement had not yielded the desired results and that a larger action might be needed, hinting at a revival of an official quantitative easing strategy, taking the Federal Reserve to resume its open market purchases.
“Treasury bond yields have already resumed their rise. Treasury is going to need a much bigger boat to stop this train. That means not only a much larger buyback than what has already been announced, but the Fed will have to join the party with an official QE program,” Schiff assessed.
While Schiff tied this to a surge in gold prices, it, consequently, might continue to ignite bitcoin prices as it has done before, as long as investors continue to value bitcoin as a relevant scarce asset and a true store of value akin to what gold has represented for hundreds of years due to its relative scarcity.