Bitcoin and crypto have rocketed higher this year, helped by fears the U.S. dollar is on “the verge of a total collapse,” setting up the bitcoin price for “a critical tipping point.”
The bitcoin price has almost doubled over the last 12 months, climbing as Russia gears up for a bitcoin and crypto flip.
Now, as former U.S. president Donald Trump teases a mystery crypto project that could rival bitcoin, economists are calling for China to unleash $1.4 trillion worth of “shock and awe” stimulus that could kick start the economy and trigger a “glorious” bitcoin price boom.
“There is a phenomenon here where there’s been a lack of confidence, this very high household savings rate for example. People do not want to spend,” Fred Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC, told the Financial Times, calling a near $1 trillion stimulus package the “baseline.”
“Shock and awe is sometimes the right approach,” Neumann said. “There’s a risk that we’ve been so incremental over the past 18 months that every announcement doesn’t rebuild that confidence that we need.”
The latest economic data out of China shows consumer inflation has remained stagnant, with the its consumer price index (CPI) climbing just 0.6% in August from a year earlier, falling short of the 0.8% rise expected by a Wall Street Journal poll of economists and fueling fears of a deflationary spiral.
Through the second quarter of 2024, China’s GDP grew 4.7% from a year ago, though in real terms, its nominal GDP, which doesn’t factor in inflation, only grew 4%, suggesting broad-based price pressures are weighing on the economy.
“The longer that deflation stays, the bigger the ask in terms of reflation,” Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley, told the FT, adding China’s “bull case” would be $1.4 trillion worth of stimulus over two years.
Last month, Arthur Hayes, a cofounder of bitcoin and crypto derivatives pioneer BitMex who went on to set up the Maelstrom investment fund, wrote in a blog post that he expects China to next year “finally unleash its long-awaited bazooka fiscal stimulus,” predicting the China-U.S. “crypto bull market shall be glorious.”
Meanwhile, bitcoin and crypto entrepreneurs and investors focused on China have said they expect China to roll back its bitcoin ban.
In June, crypto investor Brock Pierce predicted it’s only a matter of time before China reopens its digital doors to crypto, while Justin Sun, the founder of tron blockchain, called a recent legal ruling in China “very important.”
“Is China going to open up [to crypto]? … I’d say it’s inevitable,” Pierce, a former child actor who cofounded the USDT dollar-pegged stablecoin issuer Tether in Hong Kong a decade ago, told the South China Morning Post. “The question is not so much if, it’s a matter of when.”
In May, attendees of a Hong Kong bitcoin conference sparked speculation the much-hyped Hong Kong spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) could eventually be opened up to mainland China investors.
China’s 2021 bitcoin ban that made the trading and mining of cryptocurrencies including ethereum and XRP illegal, triggered a sudden bitcoin price crash at the time.
