The New York Federal Reserve has released a report on the impact of macroeconomic news on the price of cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin.
The 31-page New York Fed report #1052 (titled “The Bitcoin-Macro Disconnect“) was co-authored by Dr. Gianluca Benigno, the head of International Studies within the Monetary Policy Research Division of the New York Fed, and Carlo Rosa, a former Senior Economist at the New York Fed who is currently a director at Barclays.
The authors of the report viewed cryptocurrencies as assets whose value is linked to the estimated future prices. They expected to find that factors that influence current and future interest rates would have an impact on the value of cryptocurrencies.
The report concentrated on analyzing the behavior of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, in response to various macroeconomic news announcements. To do this, they utilized “a novel and comprehensive intraday dataset” that allows them to measure the effects of news releases.
The report considered different macroeconomic news categories, including the real economy, inflation, and forward-looking indicators, as well as monetary policy news. However, they found that with the exception of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Bitcoin was immune to all of the macroeconomic news that was taken into account.
On the other hand, traditional assets such as gold, silver, and the S&P 500 displayed a strong response to macroeconomic news. Additionally, the report found that Bitcoin’s reaction to monetary policy news was a bit of a mystery. Despite being viewed as an asset without any intrinsic value that is based on estimated future prices, the report showed that Bitcoin was not affected by unexpected changes in the short-term rate and its reaction to the future path of policy news was not consistent.
This was the conclusion of the report:
“In our empirical analysis, we find that Bitcoin is unresponsive to both monetary and macroeconomic news. In particular, the result that Bitcoin does not react to monetary news is puzzling as it casts some doubts on the role of discount rates in pricing Bitcoin. Given the short sample used in the analysis, however, more evidence is needed to assess the disconnect between Bitcoin and macroeconomic fundamentals.”
Image Credit
Featured Image via Pixabay