저자: CathieWood · 외국인
요약 보기
캐시 우드는 비트코인과 금의 상관계수가 0.14로 낮지만, 금이 먼저 오르고 비트코인이 뒤따르는 패턴이 두 번의 사이클에서 반복됐다고 주장. 현재는 그 지연(lag) 구간이며 비트코인 강세장은 유효하다고 봄. Fed는 이미 175bp 인하했고 AI로 인한 디플레이션이 물가를 낮춰 추가 완화를 이끌 것으로 예상. 바닥 구간으로 5만~5만5천 달러를 언급했고 2030년 기본 시나리오 73만 달러, 강세 시나리오 150만 달러를 제시.
다듬은 글
Everyone has been staring at Bitcoin's price, wondering what went wrong. Stocks are hitting all-time highs. Global liquidity is expanding across multiple economies at once, and yet Bitcoin has been sitting still while everything else moves. Normally, the instinct is to look for something broken, a policy problem, a sentiment problem, a cycle problem.
Cathie Wood looked at the same picture and arrived at a completely different conclusion. Her argument isn't that nothing is wrong. It's that the thing people are treating as a warning sign is actually the most historically reliable setup Bitcoin has ever produced. And the indicator she's pointing to isn't on any crypto dashboard.
She's talking about gold. Specifically, the sequencing between gold and Bitcoin across the last two major bull cycles, and why the current gap between the two assets looks less like divergence and more like a delay. That's what we're getting into today. But before we continue, this is adding value, hit subscribe.
It's free and it helps the channel keep doing this work. I wrote a letter at the beginning of the year, and in it you'll find a matrix of the correlations uh among asset classes. And uh specifically trying to understand Bitcoin. Um many people, because we call Bitcoin digital gold, they think, oh, well, surely it's highly correlated to gold.
It is not. In fact, and we did the analysis from 2019, um which is when real institutional interest started uh evolving uh uh a little more intensely. Uh the correlation between gold and Bitcoin over that time has been 0.14. Uh but if you look at the last two cycles, you'll see that gold rallied before Bitcoin did.
And uh we think the same thing is happening now. And we we monitor uh we monitor Bitcoin to gold, uh and I I feature it regularly in something called In the Know, which I do uh once a month. And on that chart, you'll see uh yes, Bitcoin relative to gold has had a significant drop. But if you look at the longer term, you'll see higher lows in terms of the very long-term trend line.
Uh and so we think that that the Bitcoin bull market is still intact. I realize we've been through what many would call uh a bear market. Uh and yet down 50% is a victory compared to down 85 or 95%. for ants, Cathie. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, that is still intact. And uh we do believe that uh Bitcoin will um will get to uh you know, new all-time highs um in this next cycle.
Many people don't, uh but we do. And you know that we're uh on record uh saying that our base case uh for 2030 is uh 730,000. Our bull case is 1.5 million. Wood starts by dismantling a popular assumption. Because Bitcoin is called digital gold, most people assume the two assets move together closely.
She went back through the numbers from 2019 onwards, which is when institutional interest in Bitcoin started becoming meaningful, and found a correlation of 0.14 between gold and Bitcoin over that period. To put that in context, a correlation of 1.0 means two assets move in perfect lockstep. At 0.14, they're essentially unrelated on a day-to-day basis.
The digital gold label is a philosophical argument about scarcity and store of value. It's not a description of how these two assets actually trade relative to each other. But here's where her argument gets more interesting than a simple correlation observation. She's not saying gold and Bitcoin move together.
She's saying gold moves first and Bitcoin follows. Looking at the last two full cycles, that sequencing held. Gold ran, Bitcoin lagged, and then Bitcoin ran harder. Her read on the current moment is that we're in the lag phase of that same pattern playing out a third time. Now, if Wood's right and we're sitting in the lag before the run, the worst version of that story is being positioned correctly on paper, but not in practice.
You've got Bitcoin on an exchange, the exchange goes down during a volatile week, and suddenly your position isn't really yours. We've watched that play out before. verify just launched the BitBox 02 Nova. you're holding through what could be the most important part of this cycle, make sure you're actually holding it.
BitBox makes that simple. First link in the description for 5% off. Now, Wood's sequencing argument is one part of her thesis, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The reason she's confident about the timing isn't just the gold pattern. It's what's happening underneath it at the macro level. And this is where the Fed comes in.
What people missed when I was making that statement was that gold was rallying. So, the store of value role of Bitcoin is also moving up. And in fact, the two cancel each other out. Actually, the the stronger the stronger move has been gold relative to Bitcoins in terms of the impact on the Bitcoin price.
So, we're we're think that we've Yeah, sure. We're in the bottoming out process. You know, David Puell, who does our on-chain analytics, says the absolute co- capitulation would occur, meaning Uh, it we may get there. I doubt it the way Bitcoin and other assets are acting, uh, but that drop-dead, uh, price range is in the 50 to 55,000 range.
Um, as I said, and and you also, uh, are alluding to, we're seeing liquidity moves around the world. And, uh, many people, because the headlines are always talking about the Fed being hawkish, not wanting to ease. Well, guess what? The Fed funds rate is down 100 175 basis points. And yet, uh, the the narrative out there is, "Oh, they're too hawkish.
They're too hawkish." They have started easing, and I think we're going to have, um, I think because inflation is going to surprise dramatically on the low side of expectations, uh, and I'll give you an anecdote. Um, Pepsi. Now, what the heck does Pepsi have to do with this story? Well, we noticed that Frito-Lay, about I'm going to say about 3 months ago, cut its pricing 15% and today it announced that its volume surprised relative to expectations significantly.
That's what should happen in a low-inflation world. You cut prices, you get more unit growth. And that's certainly the case in the technology world, and we're seeing massive deflation with AI training costs dropping 75% per year. AI inference costs, so how much does it cost ChatGPT, uh, to answer your questions?
Uh, those costs are dropping 85 to 95% per year. So, I think we're going to see a massive wave of good deflation, uh, out there. And that is, you cut prices, you get big unit growth, and that's why we expect real GDP growth to accelerate as well. Now, there's a meaningful gap between what the Federal Reserve has actually done with interest rates and how most financial media have been describing Fed policy.
The narrative has been persistently hawkish, focused on the Fed's reluctance to cut aggressively. Wood points directly at that gap. Rates have already come down substantially from their peak across multiple cuts. The hawkish story and the actual policy record aren't the same thing, and most people are still operating on the story.
She connects this to a broader global liquidity picture. M2 money supply has been rising across the US, China, and several other major economies simultaneously. ISM manufacturing indicators have been turning up. Raoul Pal, whose macro work Wood references, has been pointing to this liquidity expansion across multiple measures.
Now, what that actually means for Bitcoin specifically. When central banks expand money supply, capital doesn't sit still. It moves into assets that are scarce, that can't be printed, and that have historically absorbed liquidity faster than traditional markets. Bitcoin has done exactly that in previous expansion cycles.
The money didn't arrive the moment M2 started climbing. It arrived months later after the liquidity had time to work its way through the system and into risk assets. That lag isn't a sign the relationship is broken. It's how the relationship has always worked. And if global M2 has been climbing across multiple major economies simultaneously, the question stops being whether Bitcoin responds and starts being when.
When the Fed sees inflation dropping, and I I don't know if you pay attention to Trueflation, Trueflation's inflation rate, even with gasoline prices doing what they have done, Trueflation is up to 1.8%. It got below 1%. This is a measure of consumer price inflation, it's blockchain based, it's based on tens of thousands of items measured real time, and the core inflation measure is up to only 1.3%.
So, there was a tug-of-war in inflation by all measures, including Trueflation, um that was in the 2 to 3% range for about 2 and 1/2 to 3 years. Uh Trueflation says all of those are going to resolve to the downside. Uh and if that happens, uh we believe the Fed will ease, and one of the reasons they'll ease more is because the unemployment rate, uh while it is low, if you break it apart, you'll see entry-level jobs are being hit here.
So, companies are not firing, but they're not hiring, either. So, youth unemployment, or 16-to-24-year-old, that is at 8 and 1/2%. And now, it did get to 11%. It's at 8 and 1/2%. Uh but that that tells you that there is slack in the system on the on the employment side, which is pulling wage growth down, uh which is very interesting.
If you look at any wage measures, you'll see they're decelerating as productivity is accelerating. So, why would the Fed ease? The Fed would ease because the demand for money is increasing relative to the supply, and that's a function of unit growth. Uh and its role is uh to equilibra- or to accommodate real economic growth.
Wood introduces an argument that doesn't get nearly enough attention in crypto-focused analysis, which is the deflationary pressure being generated by artificial intelligence across the broader economy. AI training costs have been falling dramatically on an annual basis. The cost of running inference, meaning what it actually costs a company to process a user request through a large language model, has been falling even faster, somewhere between 85 and 95% per year, by her estimate.
She illustrates the consumer-level version of this dynamic through Frito-Lay. The company cut prices, volume responded well above expectations, and she uses this as a simple demonstration of what productive deflation looks like. Prices come down, more people buy, and real economic output grows without inflationary pressure.
Her argument is that AI is beginning to drive the same dynamic across a much wider range of industries, and that the inflation readings people have been worried about are going to resolve lower than almost anyone currently expects. The implication for crypto is indirect, but it follows a real chain of logic.
If AI-driven deflation pushes official inflation measures meaningfully lower over the next several quarters, the Fed's stated reasons for staying restrictive begin to lose their foundation. A central bank cutting rates into a growing economy, rather than a contracting one, is a qualitatively different environment for Bitcoin than anything the market has been pricing recently.
Now, Wood does something in this interview that many analysts avoid, which is naming the downside scenario explicitly before returning to the bull case. Her on-chain analytics team has identified a capitulation zone, a price range representing maximum seller exhaustion based on current holder cost basis data.
She says she doubts Bitcoin reaches it, given how the asset has been behaving, but she puts the range on the table, rather than pretending it doesn't exist. That kind of intellectual honesty deserves acknowledgement, especially from someone who's also on record with a base case price target of $730,000 by 2030, and a bull case of 1.5 million.
Those numbers need to be understood for what they are. They aren't a technical model with inputs you can examine and challenge line by line. They're long-range projections built on adoption curve assumptions, specifically the idea that Bitcoin will capture a growing share of global store of value demand as institutional access deepens and the asset class matures.
The methodology is more defensible than a simple trend extrapolation, but the output still requires a very specific set of conditions to hold simultaneously across a five-year period. Institutional adoption continues to deepen, global liquidity staying broadly supportive, the gold leads Bitcoin pattern completing its cycle, and no regulatory shock severe enough to reset demand at scale.
Each of those is individually plausible. All of them together, sustained over 5 years, is a meaningful ask. So, now the question is, why is Bitcoin lagging when everything around it's moving? Wood's answer, grounded in cycle history and the gold leads Bitcoin sequencing pattern, is that lagging is exactly what Bitcoin does at this point in the setup before it runs.
The evidence she brings is coherent and worth engaging with seriously. The historical pattern across two previous cycles is documented. Global liquidity is genuinely expanding. The Fed has already moved substantially from its peak, despite the hawkish narrative that dominates headlines. AI deflation is a real structural force, even if its timeline is uncertain.
And the long-term Bitcoin to gold ratio chart hasn't broken its pattern of higher lows despite the recent drawdowns. That's all for today. See you in the next one.
Comments 0