According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation data is up 8.3% maintaining a near 40-year high while bitcoin is falling below the support level of $30,000 at the time of writing.
Market expectations for CPI data hovered at 8.1%. Inflation numbers from last month reported a 40-year record breaking 8.5% continuing the largest increases observed since 1981, but right below the January 1982 inflation data of 8.4%.
The energy and transportation indices denote the largest monthly increases as Utility (Piped) Gas Services and Transportation indices rose 3.1%, while the Fuel index rose 2.7%. Food saw a 0.9% increase for its seventeenth consecutive month of increases. However, the energy index saw a 2.7% decrease, but this carries little meaning when the previous month it rose 11%.
TradingView data shows bitcoin is down 25% on the month and 40% on the year as much of this year the Federal Reserve has positioned itself towards quantitative tightening (QT) which is often used to combat inflation, rather than quantitative easing (QE), which one could argue is inflation.
The price of bitcoin currently teetering around $29,000 shows weakness in the short-term as the price has not fallen this low since July, 2021. Bitcoin tends to rise in QE environments as fabricated amounts of money enter the system which leads to a large portion of the extra dollars being invested into assets, often driving price increases. QT environments raise rates, making it harder to borrow extra money which means many assets lose in-flow of liquidity resulting in falling prices.