Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
On April 22, the US asset market once again fell into the eye of the storm. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 971 points, the Nasdaq fell by over 2.5%, and the S&P 500 index fell below the 5,200 point mark. The tech giants all plummeted, with Tesla and Nvidia falling by over 5.7% and 4.5% respectively. The VIX panic index surged 14%, breaking through 33 points, signaling that the market's systemic risk aversion sentiment is rapidly heating up.
The US dollar index simultaneously bled, breaking below the 98 mark and hitting a new low in nearly a year and a half. Both the ICE US Dollar Index and the Bloomberg Dollar Index recorded one of their worst monthly performances since 2009. Meanwhile, gold strongly broke through $3,400, creating a new historical high. Bitcoin briefly broke through $88,000 in the early morning, then pulled back to around $86,300 alongside the US stock market's decline. After the US stock market closed, it showed a different strong stance, rising and breaking through $88,800, while Altcoins generally did not return to their early morning highs.
According to Coinglass data, the entire network liquidated $261 million in the past 24 hours, with long positions liquidating $14.1 million and short positions liquidating $12.1 million. Among these, Bitcoin liquidations were $88.58 million, and Ethereum liquidations were $67.59 million.
Price changes are just the result; more fundamentally, this represents a collective reassessment of global asset anchoring structures and the historic return of non-sovereign assets in institutional gaps.
The Federal Reserve's Independence Faces Political Reshaping
Trump once again publicly criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Powell, demanding "immediate rate cuts or the economy will slow down," and the market's confidence in the Fed's political neutrality is facing an unprecedented test. This is his second high-profile pressure on monetary policy within just a few days, not only posting on Truth Social directly pointing out that the policy is "too tight" but also hinting at "considering replacing Powell" on multiple occasions.
According to Bloomberg, Trump's team is currently studying whether they have the legal power to fire Powell. On April 18, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, publicly confirmed that Trump and his advisory team are "reviewing the options".
This move touches the most sensitive red line for global investors: whether the Federal Reserve is still a central bank independent of electoral politics. For 40 years, the Federal Reserve has played a core role in the global asset allocation system.
Currently, the question of whether Powell can keep his position, which was originally considered unthinkable, has become one of the core variables of global financial capital's focus. As a result, safe-haven funds are accelerating their flow into non-sovereign assets.
It's worth noting that this sell-off is not a response to the short-term interest rate path, but feedback on the "uncertainty of decision-making rules" itself. When investors cannot determine whether interest rates are still based on economic fundamentals rather than political cycles, the dollar's credit anchor begins to loosen.
Over the past decade, global capital has widely allocated US Treasury bonds and dollar assets based on trust in the Federal Reserve's professional judgment and independence. However, once this trust is eroded, US Treasuries will no longer be unconditional safe-haven assets, and the dollar will no longer naturally possess a premium attribute. This will trigger a reassessment of the entire global asset anchoring system.
Gold and Bitcoin's Synchronized Rise: An "Anchoring Reconstruction Mechanism" in Institutional Trust Gaps
For a long time, the core asset structure of the global financial system has relied on an implied institutional trust assumption: the Federal Reserve maintains policy neutrality, the US government fulfills credit obligations, and market rules remain stable and information is symmetric.
It is this institutional trust that gives US Treasury bonds the status of a risk-free interest rate and the dollar the qualification of a global reserve currency. When administrative power frequently intervenes in monetary policy and challenges this assumption, the global capital's first reaction is not to observe the Fed's next monetary policy meeting, but to proactively reassess what assets are truly credible.
Gold has been a store of value for thousands of years, and its price has never been just a response to inflation, but a vote on institutional stability. Looking back at history, every rapid increase in gold prices has been accompanied by a recession in trust in the traditional political monetary system:
- In 1971, after the "Bretton Woods system" collapsed and gold decoupled from the dollar, prices soared;
- After the 2008 global financial crisis, gold prices quickly rose, creating historical highs;
- Currently, with the Federal Reserve facing political intervention doubts, gold again sets new highs.
This pattern remains unchanged because gold's fundamental advantage is that it does not depend on national credit, is not subject to policy intervention, and does not carry default risk. In the process of institutionalization becoming politicized and policies becoming short-term, gold provides a kind of temporal independence and historical stable expectations.
Bitcoin's synchronized rise with gold is not because it has central bank attributes, but precisely because it is not a subsidiary of any central bank.
Its monetary issuance follows mathematical rules, with total supply written into code, unaffected by any political term, election cycle, or fiscal deficit pressure. Bitcoin's rise is an expression of distrust in the "human-governed monetary system".
When the Federal Reserve's independence is doubted and the dollar is forced to accept administrative intervention, a part of the market begins to view Bitcoin as a "depoliticized value storage candidate".
Especially when US debt credit is limited (due to fiscal unsustainability), gold prices are overheated (high premiums might weaken risk-adjusted returns), and crypto asset ETF compliance channels are gradually opening up (enhancing accessibility), Bitcoin will play a hybrid role of "digital gold" and a "decentralized dollar alternative".
Regulatory Shift Signal: Atkins' Appointment and the Systemic Adjustment of Financial Governance Framework
While Trump continues to pressure the Federal Reserve, Paul S. Atkins has been sworn in as the 34th Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Although this personnel appointment seems procedurally routine, it releases an extremely strong policy signal. Atkins, as an important advocate of the "financial market liberalization" ideology during the Bush era, has always maintained that regulation should serve the market rather than dominate it. His appointment means that the governance philosophy of the US capital market may be entering a new turning cycle.
In the current crypto asset context, this transformation is particularly crucial. If Atkins adheres to his consistent stance, crypto assets may face an unprecedented period of policy channel relaxation in multiple aspects, including ETF compliance approval, RWA Token issuance, and even value distribution mechanisms in Token economic models.
However, this laissez-faire tendency might also bring structural risks. While releasing positive expectations in the short term, it will be accompanied by the blurriness of regulatory consistency and long-term behavioral expectations. The market was originally built on a compliance framework with clear rules, clear thresholds, and measurable boundaries. The softening of regulatory advocacy can easily disrupt this institutional perception, causing market participants to lose their judgment order. The crypto industry was already on the edge of regulation, and now this edge is not only not being clarified but might be exacerbated by policy tendencies' left and right swings.
In other words, Atkins' appointment marks a subtle reconstruction of the US financial governance framework: in the decentralized handling of traditional regulatory tools, the space for market self-governance is greatly amplified, but may also lose the last line of governance unity. For the crypto asset industry, this is both an opening of a compliance opportunity window and a high-stakes period of institutional evolution.
