Bitcoin Is Setting Up for $70K - But The Fed Could RUIN It

**Scott Melker** (0:02)
Bulls think that Bitcoin is setting up for a move above $70,000, but the Fed and Kevin Warsh could ruin it all today. Shame on you, Kevin. Actually, nobody thinks that's going to happen. Probably going to get a dovish Fed and could potentially be good for Bitcoin. But Citadel does think there's a chance that the Fed could hike rates today. I want to smoke whatever they're smoking, because I don't think that's happening. We're going to talk about that and more today with the badass from Bloomberg.
What is up, everybody? Good morning, happy day, and welcome to the beach. I hope that you're all having a wonderful Wednesday. It's Wednesday, right? It's Wednesday.
Happy Wednesday to all the Wednesday celebrators out there. It's hump day. And on hump day, we get a very important Fed decision today, the most important Fed decision since the last decision and until the next decision. We're going to break that all down. I'm going to bring on James right now. Good morning, sir. How are you?

**James** (1:15)
Good morning. How are you?

**Scott Melker** (1:16)
I'm great. I'm better than our friends in South Korea.

**James** (1:22)
They're all liquidated. They have to sell their homes to cover their positions, I think.

**Scott Melker** (1:26)
This is great. It starts at the headline. Bitcoin rises toward 64K as Korea's record chip crash leaves crypto untouched. For those who haven't been following along, I mean, wait, is this fucking real? Cosby Composite Index gets a circuit breaker every day. For people who haven't been tracking it, this is worse in South Korea than the COVID crash was everywhere else.
This is like the worst stock market meltdown that we've seen in years, and yes, it's just happening over there, but still absolute insanity.

**James** (1:54)
Well, part of it is like the whole index is two stocks, and also they were already two massive parts of the index, and then they went on this meteoric, absolutely insane run for semiconductor chip stocks, whatever you want to call it, and they launched a bunch of single stock levered ETFs to those stocks. It's funny, as somebody who covers the ETF world, this is big in the ETF world because you have the regulators there saying like, we never should have launched these things, they caused this problem.

**Scott Melker** (2:21)
Yeah, I've covered this at length on The Daily Wolf, my favorite. So we actually just look back on May 19th or 18th, I did a whole segment that I just launched my how not to invest segment because I saw that article that said, retirees are selling their insurance and their savings to buy SK Hynix and Samsung leveraged ETFs. And I literally said, we know how this ends. Then three weeks later, I didn't update the first time it circuit breakered and they all got liquidated. And that was like six weeks ago, right? And I did a whole story on this. The minister apologizes, said we shouldn't have done that. By the way, I created, as I often do, I created a meme three seconds before the show to explain this to everybody. Here, this is it.
Right? And yesterday, if you watch my Yahoo show, which you probably don't because you hate me, I actually said, I said, I took a picture of the floor of the Korean Stock Exchange. It was just all of them sitting there on squid game, waiting to be murdered.

**James** (3:21)
Dude, it's crazy. I mean, the numbers are just absolutely insane.
It's unlike anything that would ever happen in the US. We are way too diversified to have this sort of situation. But I mean, we're gamblers too. But South Korea, they just love to gamble, dude. They love it.

**Scott Melker** (3:36)
I mean, if you look at crypto volumes in South Korea, and so by the way, that has diminished dramatically since they got access to leverage ETFs on AI, which is kind of the same trend we've seen across all markets. And we'll get into that actually, how crypto exchanges have seen no volumes because maybe ETFs broadly, but certainly because of AI trade and leverage, just kind of taking the shine off the crypto casino. And we've seen that even on the exchanges in South Korea, which often you'll see an exchange you've never heard of in South Korea do like three times coin-based volume in a day.

**James** (4:10)
Yeah, it's just random stuff. You go on these websites and I try to track where all the volume is. I'm like, are these numbers right? They can't be right. And it's usually right.

**Scott Melker** (4:20)
You're like, what?
How did they do 40 billion in volume on Ethereum today? Or it'll be like the best stories. It's always like a random day. It's like XRP. XRP does like four times the volume of Bitcoin in a day on some Korean exchange. I think that happened with Shiba Inu this week. It was up like 29% and I think it was South Koreans. Yeah.