Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX who now runs the family-office-style fund Maelstrom, believes the macro cocktail that ignited Bitcoin’s six-fold advance from late 2022 into early 2025 is being mixed again. Speaking on the “Forward Guidance” podcast just minutes after a market-soothing Trump press conference, Hayes said the present environment “feels like November 2022.” Can Bitcoin Increase Sixfold Again? In Hayes’s telling, the fulcrum of the next impulse is not the Federal Reserve but the US Treasury. “People forgot about the other side of the equation,” he argued. “Yellen printed two-and-a-half trillion dollars just by switching issuance to bills, and now Scott Bessent is talking about Treasury buybacks—another form of stealth quantitative easing that needs no input from the Fed.” Hayes cited his own arithmetic from the previous episode: between September 2022 and early 2025, Bitcoin rose roughly 6x while the Fed’s balance sheet was ostensibly shrinking, a move he attributes almost entirely to Treasury-engineered liquidity. Related Reading: Bitcoin Explodes Above $94,000 — What’s Igniting The Fire? That dynamic, he contends, has returned. The Trump administration’s initial “maximalist” tariff schedule, announced in mid-April and aimed at slashing the US current-account deficit, triggered a brief but violent sell-off in bonds and equities before Trump began “concession after concession.” The rapid policy retreat, Hayes said, confirms that “the American financial system is so highly levered it couldn’t take one week” of trade hardball. To him, that single week exposed the political impossibility of fiscal retrenchment and made additional money creation inevitable. “They can call it whatever they want—just don’t call it QE—but it has the same effect: liquidity rises and Bitcoin benefits.” Hayes’s decoupling thesis rests on arithmetic as much as narrative. If tariffs do trim the current-account gap, the mirror-image financial-account surplus must also fall, reducing foreign demand for US mega cap stocks. “Mathematically, if Trump is serious, foreigners have to sell stocks. Period,” he said. In that world, Bitcoin’s flows are driven not by equity beta but by a global scramble for neutral stores of value amid escalating currency and trade friction. He expects “US-tech exceptionalism” to fade just as Bitcoin’s structural bid strengthens. Related Reading: Bitcoin Spot Volume Nearly Triples As BTC Breaks $91,000 The former BitMEX chief also sees a latent tail-risk in Japan. A stronger yen, encouraged by Washington to help weaken the dollar, could force Japanese investors to unwind enormous USD carry trades, dumping Treasuries and pushing yields toward levels that would “corner the Fed into covert curve control.” Any volatility spike of that kind, Hayes noted, historically elicits a rapid-fire response from the Federal Reserve—even if it arrives cloaked as a new alphabet facility rather than outright bond-buying. “Every time bond-market volatility spikes, the Fed does something,” he remarked. “It might not be QE in the traditional form, but it leads to the same outcome.” Throughout the hour-long conversation Hayes returned to November 2022 as the template. Back then, markets were reeling from the aftermath of FTX and bond yields were surging, yet Bitcoin began a relentless grind upward as the Treasury tapped the reverse-repo basin for fresh cash. Today, he sees an echo: “This feels like November 2022,” he told host Felix Jauvin. “Shit’s going up.” While Hayes stopped short of naming a price target, the implication was clear. In 2022–25 the stealth-liquidity wave took Bitcoin from roughly $16,000 to above $100,000. With Besson’s buyback machinery “ready to go” and political appetite for austerity already exhausted, Hayes says the stage is set for a sequel. At press time, BTC traded at $92,559. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
April 22, 2025