2 min read
Turmoil in Japan’s bond market on Tuesday spilled across global markets, dragging cryptocurrencies lower as higher Japanese yields threatened to unwind a long-standing source of cheap global funding.
The Nikkei index fell 2.5%, and the S&P 500 index dropped more than 2%, during the U.S. trading session. Bitcoin is down 3.3% over 24 hours to $89,300, according to CoinGecko data.
Gold, meanwhile, surged as much as 4% to an intraday record of $4,866 an ounce.
“The sell-off has clearly exceeded market expectations, evolving into a broad-based shock to global financial markets,” Tim Sun, senior researcher at Hashkey, told Decrypt.
For years, Japan’s ultra-low interest rates helped anchor global borrowing costs, encouraging capital to flow into higher-risk assets, including cryptocurrencies.
Strains in its bond market now threaten to reverse that dynamic, tightening global liquidity.
“I believe the markets are down because the Japanese bond market had a six standard deviation move for the past two days,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during the World Economic Forum at Davos.
In market terms, a six-standard deviation move refers to an unusually large price swing relative to recent norms, underscoring the severity of the sell-off.
Moves of that scale are rare and typically bring policy risks into sharper focus.
“Japan has two options…tighten monetary policy and reduce global liquidity or do nothing while currency and bond market implode,” Quinn Thompson, CIO at Lekker Capital, tweeted Tuesday." "Neither option is great for tech-heavy U.S. equity markets.”
Japan’s central bank is more likely to “buy time” through bond-buying programs to avoid a market collapse, Sun said. “Compared with currency depreciation, a collapse of the government bond market is a pain Japan is far less able to endure,” he said.
Bitcoin’s response suggests it remains closely tied to global liquidity conditions, with its longer-term appeal hinging on how central banks address the stress.
“If the BoJ is forced to engage in de facto money printing to purchase bonds… it is effectively signaling that the central bank has chosen debt solvency at the expense of the value of fiat currency,” Sun said. “This is precisely the core narrative behind Bitcoin as an inflation-resistant, non-sovereign asset.”
Whether that narrative ultimately reasserts itself will depend on how the Bank of Japan responds, as investors weigh the near-term need for market stability against the risk of tighter global liquidity.
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