Bitcoin aims for $24,000, helped by the Fed´s speech

The market welcomed the Federal Reserve's (Fed) decision to raise interest rates by 25 basis points, especially thanks to the words of its chairman, Jerome Powell, who assured that the Fed could make "a couple" more hikes before slowing down its aggressive tightening campaign. "We can say for the first time that the disinflationary process has begun," stated the central banker, while acknowledging that he sees no possibility of cutting interest rates this year.

"Recent indicators point to moderate growth in spending and output. Job creation has been solid in recent months and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation has eased somewhat, but remains elevated. Russia's war against Ukraine is causing tremendous human and economic hardship and is contributing to increasing global uncertainty. The Committee is very attentive to inflation risks," the monetary body explained in its statement.

Despite the prevailing optimism in the market, there are many analysts who recall that there is still a significant disparity of opinion between investors and the central bank. "For all of Fed chair Jay Powell’s insistence that more rate hikes were coming, and that the Fed was not looking at cutting rates this year, his failure to push back emphatically on direct questions about market expectations of rate cuts this year, as well as the loosening of financial conditions has created an even greater divergence between market pricing on rates, and the Fed’s expectations of how the economy is likely to evolve. To borrow a line from Cool Hand Luke, “what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate," explained Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in the UK.

"Long story short, the market thinks the inflation job is done, even if the Fed hasn’t arrived at that conclusion yet. Consequently, this goes a long way to explaining why US markets closed strongly higher and yields and the US dollar plunged to 9-month lows, with the euro hitting 1.1000 for the first time since April last year," he added.

Be that as it may, the truth is that cryptocurrencies continue to benefit from the return of optimism to the market. Still, many experts remain unclear how long this rebound can be sustained, if at all, while others are more optimistic. "Historically, as interest rates rise moderately, as opposed to aggressively the average returns and Bitcoin increase massively, more so than traditional assets since the speculators return quickly to buy as the credit and money become more available," noted CoinDesk expert, Jodie Gunzberg.

However, optimism may be shaken if today, on Thursday, tech giants once again disappoint investors. After the disappointing figures from Microsoft, which saw its cloud services business continue to slow down, and the good results of Meta (Facebook), which certified that its division dedicated to the metaverse continues to lose huge amounts of money, today it is the turn of Apple, Amazon and Alphabet (Google).

These three giants of the market have many question marks before them and some, such as Amazon, have already announced that their Christmas season was not as satisfactory as they would have liked. Alphabet, for its part, is facing two attacks on its main revenue streams: a slowdown in its Google Cloud division and an antitrust lawsuit for allegedly abusing the advertising market. As for Apple, the Cupertino giant could see its revenues fall for the first time in more than three years after a hectic Christmas campaign.

In other market news, there have been gains across the board. Binance coin (BNB) soars 7%, while Polygon (MATIC) rises 11.5%. Ripple (XRP), Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) increase 3.7%, 4.5% and 6.9%, respectively.