- US consumer prices rose 0.4% in October after rising 0.6% in September, so the monthly pace slowed. Core prices rose 0.3% for a third month running.
- Decrypt reports bitcoin fell below $74,000, touching around $73,525, with roughly $178m of leveraged long positions inside an hour. No price or liquidation data provider was named in that report.
- No rate decision has been taken. Market pricing quoted in the same piece puts a half-point December rise at nearly 15%, which leaves a quarter point or nothing as the likelier outcomes.
A statistics release in Washington moved the bitcoin price this week, which is ordinary enough. Less ordinary is the detail underneath it: the inflation figure traders sold on was lower than September’s, and the rate rise they are bracing for is still a minority outcome in the market’s own pricing.
Interest rates set by the US central bank are the largest outside force on the bitcoin price, and nobody holding crypto has any say over them. For a UK holder that works through two layers at once. Your money sits in a dollar-priced asset moved by American policy, and then comes back to you through a pound-dollar rate the Bank of England is steering on a different timetable.
Inflation data has also become one of the few scheduled events that reliably produces a sharp move within the hour. Knowing roughly how much fear is already in the price is the difference between reading one of these stories and reacting to it.
What the figures actually say
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics release: the consumer price index rose 0.4% in October, seasonally adjusted, after a 0.6% rise in September. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy because both swing for reasons that have little to do with the wider economy, rose 0.3%. That matched August and September.
Decrypt reported that economists had expected 0.3% on the headline figure and 0.2% on core. The BLS does not publish forecasts, so the “beat” is a comparison with an outside consensus rather than anything the statistics agency said. Both things in this story are true at the same time: prices rose faster than forecasters guessed, and they rose more slowly than the month before. The word “hot” covers the first and quietly implies the second.
There is a gap in this month’s data worth knowing about. The BLS says it could not publish 12-month percentage changes for many series, because no October 2025 survey data were collected during a lapse in appropriations. The annual rate is the number most people use to sanity-check a monthly wobble, and for October it mostly does not exist. Each monthly print is therefore carrying more interpretive weight than usual.
Why a rate rise pushes crypto down at all
The Federal Reserve sets the rate at which banks lend to one another overnight, and that rate feeds into what borrowing costs across the economy. When it goes up, cash deposits and government bonds pay more for taking no real risk. Money drifts towards them.
Bitcoin pays no interest and produces no earnings. It competes for the same money purely on the prospect of the price going up, which is a harder sell when a savings account is paying well. Higher rates also make borrowing dearer, and a meaningful share of crypto buying is done with borrowed money.
That is where the liquidation figure comes from. A leveraged long is a bet on the price rising, placed with funds borrowed from the exchange. Fall past a set level and the position is closed out automatically, selling into an already falling market and pushing it down further. The $178m Decrypt reported is a measure of how much of that happened in the first hour, not a measure of how many people decided to sell.
A quarter point and a half point are different stories
The Fed normally moves in quarter-point steps, or 25 basis points, a basis point being one hundredth of a percentage point. A half-point move is twice as large and reads as urgency: a signal that the committee thinks it is behind the problem. Fed Governor Christopher Waller was reported to have suggested 50 basis points could be considered in December. We could not find a transcript or a venue for those remarks, so we are not quoting them.
Market-implied odds of that half-point move rose to nearly 15%, according to the same report. A jump in that probability is a real change in sentiment and worth reporting. It is also a number that leaves roughly 85% of the pricing on something else. The headline fear and the pricing underneath it are not describing the same expectation.
One further piece of context. Most people who have held crypto for a few years learned the rate rule during a cutting cycle, where easier money lifted risk assets. The mechanism runs the same way in reverse, but the mood around it is different, and the responses tend to be quicker and sharper. This fall also had a different driver from the equity-led slide covered in our markets coverage earlier this month, even though the chart shape looks similar.
What to watch
The December meeting itself, and whether that 15% probability holds, climbs or fades over the next few weeks. A probability drifting back under 5% would tell you the market has read Waller as an outlier.
Then the next CPI release, and specifically whether the 12-month series returns. Until it does, every monthly figure will be read without its usual context, which makes outsized reactions to single prints more likely rather than less.