It's Saturday night, I've got the Eagles-Patriots pregame chatter on mute in the other room, and I just refreshed Coinbase for probably the ninth time today. Not because anything good is happening. Bitcoin's been sliding all week and today it dipped under $8,200, which is honestly wild to type when I remember checking it at almost $19,000 back in December and feeling like a genius for about four days.
Some of the slide is just gravity, prices that go up 20x in two months tend to come back down eventually. But there's a specific reason things got uglier this week: India's finance minister stood up during the country's budget speech on Thursday and said flat out that the government doesn't consider cryptocurrencies legal tender and plans to "eliminate" their use in illegitimate activity. He didn't announce an outright ban, people are still arguing about what it actually means in practice, but markets don't wait around for nuance. The whole sector took a leg down within hours.
And it wasn't just crypto having a bad week. The regular stock market had its worst day in about two years on Friday, the Dow dropped somewhere around 666 points (yes, I noticed the number too, everyone on Twitter noticed the number too) on the back of a jobs report that showed wages growing faster than expected. Which sounds like good news, people are getting paid more. But apparently that spooks bond traders because it hints at inflation and higher interest rates down the line, so stocks got dumped instead. I will never fully understand why "workers earn more money" is the headline that tanks a market, but that's finance for you, it runs on vibes as much as anything else.
Apple's earnings landed in the middle of all this too, Thursday after the bell. Record revenue, $88.3 billion for the quarter, which is an absurd number to say out loud. But iPhone unit sales came in a bit under what analysts wanted, something like 77 million versus the 80 million people were expecting, and because the iPhone X is priced at a thousand bucks the assumption going in was that it'd move mountains of units. The stock dipped on the news even though by any sane measure this was a great quarter. I've had my X since November and I still don't love Face ID in low light, it fumbles around more than Touch ID ever did, but that's a nitpick and not a reason revenue should've disappointed anyone.
None of this is really my money to lose in any serious sense. I put a small amount into Ethereum back in November mostly out of curiosity and I'm still up overall even after this week's carnage, so I'm not writing this as some sob story. It's more that watching three separate systems, crypto, equities, and a trillion-dollar phone company, all wobble in the same five day stretch makes you notice how much of this stuff is downstream of a handful of headlines and a bit of investor mood. Nobody's underlying business changed dramatically between Monday and Friday. The narrative did.
My brother-in-law, meanwhile, is still holding onto Litecoin he bought near the top and insisting it's "a long-term thing now," which is what everyone says the moment their short-term thing stops working. I love the guy but I'm not touching that conversation at dinner tomorrow, especially with the Super Bowl on right after. Eagles and Patriots, kickoff tomorrow evening in Minneapolis, and for the first time in a long time I don't have a strong opinion on who wins, I just want a game that isn't decided in garbage time. Feels appropriate for a week where nobody seems totally sure what's coming next either.
Anyway. If you bought crypto in December, hydrate, and maybe don't check the app again until Monday.