Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
On April 22, the US asset market was once again caught in the eye of the storm. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 971 points, the Nasdaq fell more than 2.5%, and the SP 500 fell below the 5,200-point mark. The seven technology giants fell across the board, with Tesla and Nvidia falling more than 5.7% and 4.5% respectively. The VIX panic index soared 14%, breaking through 33 points, indicating that the markets systemic risk aversion is rapidly heating up.
The US dollar index also lost money, falling below the 98 mark, hitting a new low in nearly a year and a half. The ICE Dollar Index and the Bloomberg Dollar Index both recorded one of the worst monthly performances since 2009. At the same time, gold broke through $3,400, setting a new record high. Bitcoin briefly broke through $88,000 in the early morning, and then fell back to around $86,300 with the decline of US stocks. After the US stock market closed, it once again showed a different tough attitude, rising above $88,800, while altcoins generally did not return to their highs in the early morning.
According to Coinglass data, the total liquidation of the entire network in the past 24 hours was $261 million, with long positions liquidated at $14,100 and short positions liquidated at $12,100. Among them, Bitcoin liquidated at $88.5787 million and Ethereum liquidated at $67.5928 million.
Price changes are only the result. What is more profound is the collective reassessment of the global asset anchoring structure and the historic return of non-sovereign assets emerging from institutional cracks.
The Federal Reserves independence is facing a political reshaping
Trump once again publicly blasted Fed Chairman Powell, demanding an immediate rate cut or the economy will slow down. The markets confidence in the Feds political neutrality is being tested as never before. This is the second time in just a few days that he has put pressure on the monetary policy path. Not only did he post on Truth Social directly pointing out that policy is too tight, he also leaked on multiple occasions that he was considering replacing Powell.
According to Bloomberg, the Trump team is currently studying whether it has the legal authority 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 relevant options.
This move touched 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.
However, at present, the question of whether Powell can keep his job, which was originally considered to be a non-issue, has become one of the core variables of common concern for global financial capital. As a result, safe-haven funds are accelerating their inflow into non-sovereign assets.
It is worth noting that this sell-off is not a reaction to the short-term interest rate path, but a feedback to the decision rule uncertainty itself. When investors cannot judge whether interest rates are still based on economic fundamentals rather than political cycles, the credit anchor of the US dollar begins to loosen.
In the past decade, global capital has widely allocated US Treasury bonds and US dollar assets, precisely out of trust in the professional judgment and independence of the Federal Reserve. However, once this trust is eroded, US Treasury bonds will no longer be an unconditional safe-haven asset, and the US dollar will no longer have a natural premium attribute. This will trigger a reassessment of the entire global asset anchoring system.
Why gold and Bitcoin rise in resonance: the anchoring reconstruction mechanism in the institutional trust gap
For a long time, the core asset structure of the global financial system has relied on an implicit institutional trust assumption that the Federal Reserve maintains policy neutrality, the U.S. government fulfills its credit obligations, and market rules are stable and information is symmetric.
It is this institutional trust that makes U.S. Treasury bonds have the status of risk-free interest rates and the U.S. dollar qualified as a global reserve currency. When the executive power frequently intervenes in monetary policy and this assumption is challenged, the first reaction of global capital is not to observe the next interest rate meeting of the Federal Reserve, but to actively re-evaluate what are truly credible assets.
Gold has been a medium of value storage for thousands of years, and its price has never been just a response to inflation, but also a vote for institutional stability. Looking back at history, every rapid rise in gold prices has been accompanied by a decline in trust in the traditional political and monetary system:
In 1971, the Bretton Woods system collapsed, and gold prices skyrocketed after it was decoupled from the U.S. dollar;
After the 2008 global financial crisis, gold prices rose rapidly to record highs;
As the Federal Reserve is facing questions about political interference, gold has once again hit a new high.
This rule has not changed, because the essential advantage of gold is that it does not rely on national credit, is not subject to policy intervention, and has no default risk. In the process of institutional politicization and short-term policies, gold provides a kind of temporal independence and historical stable expectations.
The reason why Bitcoin began to rise synchronously with gold is not because it has the attributes of a central bank, but precisely because it is not an appendage of any central bank.
Its currency issuance follows mathematical rules, and the total supply is written into the code, which is not affected by any political term, election cycle or fiscal deficit pressure. The rise of Bitcoin is an expression of distrust in the man-ruled monetary system.
When the independence of the Federal Reserve was questioned and the US dollar was forced to accept administrative intervention, some funds in the market began to view Bitcoin as a depoliticized store of value candidate.
Especially when the credit of U.S. Treasury bonds is limited (due to fiscal unsustainability), the gold price is overheated (high premiums may weaken risk-adjusted returns), and the compliance channels of crypto asset ETFs are gradually opened (improving accessibility), Bitcoin will play a hybrid role of digital gold and decentralized dollar alternative.
Signal of regulatory shift: Atkinss appointment and systemic adjustment of the financial governance framework
While Trump continues to put pressure on the Federal Reserve, Paul S. Atkins was sworn in as the 34th Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Although this personnel appointment seems to be in accordance with the rules in terms of procedures, it actually sends a strong policy signal. As an important advocate of the financial market liberalization trend in the Bush era, Atkins has always advocated that regulation should serve the market rather than dominate the market. His appointment means that the governance philosophy of the U.S. capital market may enter a new turning cycle.
In the current context of crypto assets, this shift is particularly critical. If Atkins sticks to his consistent position, crypto assets may usher in an unprecedented period of policy easing in the future in terms of ETF compliance approval, RWA token issuance, and even the value distribution mechanism in the Token economic model.
However, this laissez-faire tendency may also bring structural risks. While releasing positive expectations in the short term, it will be accompanied by the ambiguity 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, and the softening of regulatory claims can easily break this institutional perception and cause disordered judgment among market participants. The crypto industry was already on the edge of regulation, and now this edge is not only not clarified by the rules, but may also exacerbate its institutional uncertainty due to the swing of policy tendencies.
In other words, Atkins appointment marks a subtle reconstruction of the US financial governance framework: in the decentralized treatment of traditional regulatory tools, the space for market autonomy has been greatly expanded, but it may also lose the last line of defense for governance unity. For the crypto asset industry, this is both the opening of a compliance opportunity window and a highly competitive game during the institutional evolution period.
