Arthur Hayes says Trump’s tariffs will break Bitcoin’s correlation to Nasdaq

Arthur Hayes thinks Bitcoin is finally breaking out of its relationship with the Nasdaq. And he’s blaming it on Donald Trump’s new tariffs. The BitMEX founder went off on X, saying: 

“$BTC hodlers need to learn to love tariffs, maybe we finally broke the correlation with Nasdaq, and can move onto the purest form of a fiat liquidity smoke alarm.”

For the past few years, Bitcoin has been glued to the Nasdaq 100, dancing to the same beat as tech giants. But on Friday, the coin went up 1%, hovering near $83,300, while the Nasdaq 100 tanked for the second straight day. This wasn’t a slow drift—it was a real-time break-up. All triggered by Trump’s tariffs announced late Wednesday, a move that’s now burning through global markets like wildfire.

Trump’s tariff war knocks out stocks and bonds

According to Arthur, this isn’t just about short-term market noise. He called it the “end of US Treasuries” and a partial collapse of U.S. stocks as global reserve assets. He pointed out how U.S. Treasury debt has ballooned 85x since Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971.

That explosion, Arthur said, only helped part of the population. The rest got screwed. “Trump was elected on average by those who believe they didn’t share in the US ‘prosperity’ of the last 50 years,” he wrote.

The math is brutal. Kill the U.S. current account deficit, and foreigners stop getting dollars. No dollars means no foreign buyers for bonds or stocks. So what happens? Countries start dumping their U.S. assets to feed their own nation-first plans.

Arthur said even if Trump pulls back on tariffs, no global leader will trust him again. “You must do what is best for your country.”

Meanwhile, China retaliated fast, within 48 hours, setting off what now looks like a feedback loop. The S&P 500 Index fell 6% in two days, a drop not seen since the start of COVID in March 2020. 

That erased $5 trillion in value. The Nasdaq 100 cratered more than 20% from its mid-February peak. Stocks tanked across Asia, Europe, and emerging markets. The bond market got slammed too, as traders rushed into government bonds hoping for safety.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell didn’t help. He said this trade mess would slow growth and raise inflation, which could make rate cuts a lot harder.

That freaked traders out more. They dialed back expectations for relief, and the markets fell even harder. No one’s expecting a fast recovery from this. Not with tariffs rewriting the rules of the game.

Bitcoin holds steady while gold sneaks back into play

Back in the crypto market, things looked a lot calmer. Even during the storm, Bitcoin didn’t crash. And according to Arthur, this is just the start. He said gold is about to make a serious comeback too. “The return of gold as the neutral reserve asset,” he wrote.

Not because the dollar’s going away—but because gold is tariff-exempt. And governments want something they can use to settle global trade without getting slapped by Trump’s mood swings.

Arthur also said a lot of rich folks are in denial, thinking things will “return to normal.” He called that “poppycock.” His advice? If you want to live in this new world, buy gold, gold miners, and Bitcoin. Simple as that.

He’s not the only one seeing the shift. Bohan Jiang from Abra echoed the same vibe. He said that with Bitcoin outside the tariff war, and with the U.S. pushing de-dollarization through its policies, the crypto space might not be as volatile as everything else.

Arthur finished his post with another grenade: “My next essay will focus on why USDCNY is going to 10.00 bc there is no way that Xi Jinping will agree to change China in the ways necessary to placate Trump. This is the super bazooka $BTC needs to ascend rapidly towards $1 million.”

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