Fed Holds Rates Steady—Bitcoin and Stocks Breathe a Sigh of Relief
Markets exhale as Powell & Co. kick the can down the road—again. Bitcoin claws back toward $60K while the S&P 500 edges up, because apparently ’unchanged’ counts as bullish now.
Wall Street’s ’bad news is good news’ playbook strikes again: no rate hike means the punch bowl stays spiked. Crypto traders cheer the liquidity lifeline, ignoring the fact that the Fed just admitted the economy’s on life support.
Funny how ’higher for longer’ suddenly became ’maybe just one cut please?’—central bankers rewriting the rules mid-game as usual. Meanwhile, your savings account yield remains a joke.
Fed blames tariffs, Trump doubles down
Jerome Powell, head of the Fed, told reporters that if the “large increases in tariffs” currently on the table remain, the country may face slower growth, longer-lasting inflation, and rising job losses. “They could lead to a slowdown in economic growth, an uptick in long-term inflation, and an increase in unemployment,” Powell said. His comment wasn’t subtle.
The response from the White House wasn’t subtle either. President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters the same day, said he will not roll back tariffs on China, even as talks are scheduled for the weekend in Switzerland. His trade team is set to meet Chinese officials, but there’s zero promise of compromise.
David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, said during CNBC’s Power Lunch, “This is a somewhat hawkish statement.
It says, ‘We are not going to be in any hurry to cut rates because honestly there are risks to both sides of our mandate here and we are not sure which way we should be playing this.’” Kelly also said the Fed’s message was clearly aimed at the Trump administration.
“If you read between the lines, ‘Your policies are leading to higher inflation, higher unemployment.’”
While policy drama played out in D.C., tech stocks dragged down the market. Alphabet dropped roughly 8%, and Apple lost 1.5% after a Bloomberg report revealed Apple plans to add AI-driven search tools to Safari, possibly replacing Google as the default search partner.
Bitcoin rises as traders take profits
Outside of Wall Street, Bitcoin traded around $96,500 shortly after the Fed announcement. That’s a 1.7% gain in just one hour. CoinGecko data showed BTC has climbed 22% in the past week. But it’s not just new money flooding in — investors are taking profits aggressively.
A post on May 8 from CryptoQuant said that Bitcoin’s 7-day moving average for Net Realized Profit/Loss has been strongly positive since early 2024. It’s now hitting over $1 billion a day, which they called “still high” even after the market’s rebound from the March-April 2025 pullback. It’s not as wild as the November–December 2024 surge, but it’s enough to raise eyebrows.
CryptoQuant linked the trend to late-stage bull market behavior — traders taking gains while prices continue to climb. They pointed to previous cycles, like 2021, where this exact pattern happened before local tops or sudden corrections. This time, they said the market looks the same, just a lot bigger.
Since spot ETFs were introduced in January 2024, the structure of the crypto market has shifted. But the behavior hasn’t. CryptoQuant wrote that although the tools are new, the mindset is exactly what it was before: “Same behavior, bigger scale.”
They warned that as long as realized profits stay this high, the chance of a pullback will grow. If the profit-taking slows, it could be a sign the market is entering a new phase.
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