SINGAPORE- Bitcoin broke $100,000 on Thursday as investors bet on a friendly regulatory shift in the U.S., while Asian stocks were firm after Wall Street indexes notched record highs on growing confidence in US interest rate cuts.
BitcoinBTC= hit the $100,000 mark in the Asia morning and was last at $103,400.
“At the end of the day, it’s just a number,” said Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered.
“But the reality is we’ve been able to get to this level because the industry has become institutionalized this year particularly – and that’s mostly the ETF inflows,” he said, referring to exchange traded funds approved earlier this year.
The S&P 500 Nasdaq and Dow had all notched record highs overnight.
Over the past week and a half markets have all but priced in an extra US rate cut for 2025 and the implied chance of a cut in December has lifted from even to around 75 percent.
S&P 500 futures slipped a tad while European futures fell 0.2 percent. German stocks are up 4 percent in a week and at record-high levels.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan dipped 0.2 percent as selling in Hong Kong offset gains in Australia and Japan. Japan’s Nikkei touched a three-week high and was last up about 0.4 percent.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell around 1.1 percent.
The closely watched US ISM survey showed services sector activity slowed in November after posting big gains in recent months. Benchmark 10-year Treasury yields fell three basis points to 4.182 percent. They were steady in Asia trade.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell made balanced comments at a New York Times event on Wednesday, describing the economy as in good shape but not really pushing back on market pricing for rate cuts.
Earlier this week Fed Governor Christopher Waller had said he was leaning towards a cut later in December. European retail sales figures and German factory orders are due later in the day, though the week’s focus is on US employment data on Friday where a strong reading could reverse bond-market moves.
“Generally data in the US has continued to be pretty resilient,” said RBC Capital Markets’ chief economist in Sydney, Su-Lin Ong, noting measures such as the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate are for solid growth at 3.2 percent in the fourth quarter. “We think the market has got too much priced in.”
