Bears on the prowl

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The greenback is soaring. There’s fear in the air. If this Monday morning was a horror film, it would be scored with an eerie barrage of out-of-tune string instruments and piano keys struck randomly by tossed hammers.

Not only are there elevated anxiety levels being triggered by the U.S. Federal Reserve's inflation-fighting remedy of hiking interest rates more aggressively, but the long pandemic now has come completely full circle with a new outbreak in Beijing that has stirred up some old nightmares, ones in which cities are locked down, global supply chains get disrupted and inflation, around the world, is exacerbated. Good times.

The Chinese yuan fell to 6.553 against the dollar. The dollar index, which tracks the greenback's value against majors, topped 101 for the first time since March 2020 (CoinDesk).

Meanwhile, Twitter shares rose 5% amidst reports that it'll accept Elon Musk's bid. Sure enough, Dogecoin at 9:35 a.m. (EST) stood at about 14 cents, rising over the prior hour and suddenly shading from red to green over 24 hours. Peak DOGE ($0.73) came last May.

Daredevils of the world have put their bungee cords into storage and sold off their motorcycles. They've sold off everything, really – stocks, commodities, major cryptos, altcoins, DeFi, GameFi, TradeFi, fee-fi, fo, fum, you name it.

Asia's equities markets dumped. As did the European stock markets. Although that sell-off would have been a lot worse had Macron lost France's presidential election. U.S. stock futures were tanking as a new trading week was set to begin. The Nasdaq Composite is down nearly 10% for the month. The S&P 500 is down 11% from its high, a realm that could be considered corrective as of the moment. The Nasdaq is down by more than 20% relative to its peak.

Among Big Ten digital assets, XRP has taken some of the hardest knocks, declining 5.6% over 24 hours as of 8:25 a.m. (EST). Bitcoin and Ethereum were each down about 2%. A couple of alts have lost 10% in the past day, those being Zilliqa and Stacks.

As of 9:20 a.m. (EST), Bitcoin was inching its way back toward the outer lip of a ledge on the gravelly cliffside that is $39,000 after earlier sinking to just below $38,500, its lowest level since March 15.

BTC has shed 12% in the past 30 days, according to CoinGecko. The flavor of the month: risk aversion.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week heaved a possible 50-basis-point hike on to the table like some consternated, determined-to-be-appreciated host of a fraught family dinner.

Crypto sentiment appears quite bearish, CoinDesk said.

Twitter pundits are fretting about an impending flag pattern breakdown on BTC's technical chart, a harrowing harbinger of a descent south of $30K.

One exchange official noted "general downward pressure" coupled with intermittent "short pushes that produce very little and get beaten down due to long liquidations."

"We are not far from peak inflation hysteria," Tagus Capital's Illan Solot told CoinDesk.

But it seems "the jury is out" as far as where BTC might bottom once the hysteria fades.