BTC price clings to $20K as US stocks lose the equivalent of 4 Bitcoin market caps

Bitcoin (BTC) briefly lost $20,000 support overnight into Sep. 14 after hot United States inflation sent risk assets crashing lower.

Markets lose big in bid to “fight the Fed”

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView followed BTC/USD as it hit lows of $19,870 on Bitstamp — its worst since Sep. 9.

The move came amid a stocks rout triggered by Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation data for August coming in above expectations.

Despite still being lower than July, the market had hoped for a quicker cooling of inflation more broadly and hence the chance of a quicker loosening of policy by the Federal Reserve.

With that prospect now appearing slim, equities indexes hemorrhaged value, with Apple losing $154 billion — the sixth-biggest daily loss in U.S. stock market history.

Tech selloff on Tue has been particularly costly for Apple. World’s most-valuable comp lost $154bn in market value – a wipeout that ranks among top 10 worst single-day market value losses in US stock market history, acc to BBG. That’s more than mkt cap of ~90% of S&P 500 comps. pic.twitter.com/M32soxmDPn

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) September 13, 2022

“Markets had tried desperately to spin a bull case and fight the Fed, basically, and that’s a dangerous place to be,” Carol Schleif, deputy chief investment officer at BMO Family Office, told Bloomberg.

In total, U.S. stocks fell by approximately $1.6 trillion on the day — more than four times the Bitcoin market cap.

The U.S. dollar consequently increased in strength, with the U.S. dollar index (DXY) surging back towards twenty-year highs.

At the time of writing, the index circled just under 110, less than 0.9% below that macro peak seen earlier in the month.

“Septembear” comes back to haunt BTC bull

At the time of writing, cross-market crypto liquidations totaled $355 million, with Sep. 13 forming one of the largest long liquidation events in recent weeks.

Related: Bitcoin margin long-to-short ratio at Bitfinex reach the highest level ever

Data from on-chain monitoring resource Coinglass also captured $88 million of short liquidations on that day.

The sell-off thus left BTC/USD up just 1% for the month of September, which was nonetheless still the first “green” September since 2016, Coinglass showed.