Cryptocurrency News & Market Updates

The Month In One Paragraph

October reverses the order in which a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decision is normally made. The committee meets on 27 and 28 October with no Summary of Economic Projections, and the September personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, the gauge it actually targets, arrives on 29 October, the morning after. It will have the September employment report on 2 October, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on 14 October and the Producer Price Index (PPI) on 15 October. Pricing into the month is close to a coin toss: fed funds futures put 47.1 percent on a further increase on 28 October against 52.9 percent on no change, while the committee’s own September projections put the policy rate at 4.1 percent at the end of both 2026 and 2027, one more increase and then nothing given back. The price of money has meanwhile kept rising on its own: the 10-year inflation-adjusted Treasury yield, the real return on a risk-free asset, reached 2.90 percent on 28 September from 2.44 percent at the end of August, and the 30-year nominal yield reached 5.59 percent on 29 September. Bitcoin rose about 6 percent in September against that, carried by roughly $2.5 billion of net inflows into US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the three weeks to 29 September. October tests whether that bid will keep paying a rising real return.