Bitcoin bulls stumble at $23.4K as Fed's 'disinflation' sparks BTC price rally

cointelegraph.com:

Bitcoin (BTC) rebounded to key resistance into Feb. 8 as crypto markets got a boost from a familiar source.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD reaching the important $23,400 zone on Bitstamp overnight.

The pair reacted positively to the latest comments from the United States Federal Reserve, these also serving to send equities higher during the Feb. 7 Wall Street trading session.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell again mentioned “disinflation” during his appearance, reinforcing market hopes that interest rate hikes could cool more quickly in line with inflation. These stemmed from the latest meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Feb. 1, where the Fed raised rates by 0.25%.

“The message that we were sending at the FOMC meeting last Wednesday was really that the disinflationary process — the process of getting inflation down — has begun, and it’s begun in the goods sector, which is about a quarter of our economy,” he said at The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Powell nonetheless cautioned that there was “a long way to go” and that the U.S. was in “the very early stages of disinflation.”

Despite this, risk assets rallied into the Wall Street close, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index finishing up 1.3% and 1.9%, respectively.

Bitcoin also erased previous weakness, having dropped below $22,700 earlier in the week, but bulls proved unable to tackle ask liquidity at $23,400 and beyond.

That liquidity remained in place on the day, as visible in data covering the Binance order book supplied by on-chain monitoring resource Material Indicators.

“Markets rallied into the close yesterday, with Bitcoin's last H4 candle showing weakness at resistance & printing a shooting star,” popular trader