Original Title: "Bitcoin Drops Back to 10,000?! A Bloomberg Expert Gives the Most Pessimistic Prediction"
Original Author: Seed.eth, Bitpush News
The past weekend did not bring a recovery in sentiment for the crypto market. After several days of narrow fluctuations, Bitcoin faced significant pressure from Sunday evening to Monday during U.S. stock hours, with its price dropping below the 90,000 USD mark, hitting a low of around 86,000 USD during the session. ETH fell 3.4% to 2,980 USD; BNB dropped 2.1%; XRP decreased by 4%; and SOL fell 1.5%, retreating to around 126 USD. Among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, only TRX recorded a slight increase of less than 1%, while the others were all in a correction phase.
From a temporal perspective, this is not an isolated adjustment. Since reaching an all-time high in mid-October, Bitcoin has cumulatively retraced over 30%, with each rebound appearing brief and hesitant. Although ETF funds have not seen systemic outflows, the marginal inflow has clearly slowed, making it difficult to provide the "emotional foundation" for the market as it did previously. The crypto market is transitioning from a one-sided optimism to a more complex phase that tests patience.
In this context, Bloomberg Intelligence's senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone released a new report, placing Bitcoin's current trend within a larger macro and cyclical framework, and presented a judgment that has caused significant unease in the market: Bitcoin is very likely to return to 10,000 USD by 2026, and this is not alarmist rhetoric, but rather one of the potential outcomes under a special "deflationary" cycle.
The reason this viewpoint has sparked considerable controversy is not just because the number itself is "too low," but because McGlone does not view Bitcoin as an independent crypto asset; instead, he reexamines it within the long-term coordinate system of "global risk assets - liquidity - wealth return."
"Deflation after Inflation"? McGlone's focus is not on crypto, but on cyclical turning points
To understand McGlone's judgment, the key lies not in how he views the crypto industry, but in how he understands the macro environment in the next phase.
In his latest insights, McGlone repeatedly emphasizes a concept: Inflation / Deflation Inflection. In his view, the global market is standing near such a critical juncture. As major economies peak in inflation and growth momentum slows, the asset pricing logic is shifting from "fighting inflation" to addressing "deflation after inflation"—the phase of comprehensive price declines following the end of the inflation cycle. He wrote: "The downward trend of Bitcoin may replicate the situation faced by the stock market in 2007 in response to Federal Reserve policies."
This is not the first time he has issued a bearish warning. As early as last November, he predicted that Bitcoin would drop to the 50,000 USD mark.
He pointed out that by around 2026, commodity prices may fluctuate around a key central axis—the "inflation-deflation dividing line" for core commodities like natural gas, corn, and copper may fall near 5 USD, and among these commodities, only copper, which has real industrial demand support, may still stand above this axis by the end of 2025.
McGlone noted: When liquidity recedes, the market will re-differentiate "real demand" from "financialization premium." In his framework, Bitcoin is not "digital gold," but an asset highly correlated with risk appetite and speculative cycles. When the inflation narrative recedes and macro liquidity tightens, Bitcoin often reflects these changes earlier and more violently.
In McGlone's view, his logic is not based on a single technical position, but rather on the overlap of three long-term paths.
First, it is mean reversion after extreme wealth creation. McGlone has long emphasized that Bitcoin is one of the most extreme wealth amplifiers under the global loose monetary environment of the past decade. When the growth rate of asset prices consistently far exceeds that of the real economy and cash flow, the reversion is often not gentle, but severe. Historically, whether it was the U.S. stock market in 1929 or the tech bubble in 2000, the commonality during the peak phase is that the market repeatedly seeks a "new paradigm" at high levels, and the ultimate adjustment magnitude often far exceeds the most pessimistic expectations at the time.
Second, it is the relative pricing relationship between Bitcoin and gold. McGlone particularly emphasizes the Bitcoin/gold ratio. This ratio was about 10 times at the end of 2022, then rapidly expanded under the bull market, reaching over 30 times in 2025. However, since the beginning of this year, this ratio has fallen by about 40%, down to around 21 times. In his view, if deflationary pressures persist and gold remains strong due to safe-haven demand, then a further return to historical ranges for this ratio is not an aggressive assumption.
Third, it is a systemic issue with the supply environment of speculative assets. Although Bitcoin itself has a clear total supply limit, McGlone has repeatedly pointed out that what the market is truly trading is not Bitcoin's "uniqueness," but the risk premium of the entire crypto ecosystem. When millions of tokens, projects, and narratives compete for the same risk budget, the entire sector is often uniformly discounted during a deflationary cycle, making it difficult for Bitcoin to completely detach from this revaluation process.
It should be noted that Mike McGlone is not a spokesperson for bullish or bearish views in the crypto market. As a senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg, he has long studied the cyclical relationships between crude oil, precious metals, agricultural products, interest rates, and risk assets. His predictions do not always hit the mark precisely, but their value lies in the fact that he often raises structural counter-questions when market sentiment is most uniform.
In his latest statement, he also proactively reviewed his "mistakes," including underestimating the timing of gold breaking 2,000 USD and misjudging the rhythm of U.S. Treasury yields and U.S. stocks. However, in his view, these deviations repeatedly confirm one point: the market is most prone to illusions about trends before cyclical turning points.
Other Voices: Divergence is Widening
Of course, McGlone's judgment is not a market consensus. In fact, the attitudes of mainstream institutions show significant divergence.
Traditional financial institutions like Standard Chartered have recently significantly lowered their mid- to long-term target prices for Bitcoin, reducing the 2025 expectation from 200,000 USD to about 100,000 USD, while also adjusting the 2026 imagination space from 300,000 USD to about 150,000 USD, meaning that institutions no longer assume that ETFs and corporate allocations will continue to provide marginal buying support at any price range.
Research from Glassnode indicates that Bitcoin's fluctuation range between 80,000 and 90,000 USD has put pressure on the market, with the intensity of this pressure comparable to the trend at the end of January 2022. The current market's relative unrealized losses are approaching 10% of market capitalization. Analysts further explain that such market dynamics reflect a state of "liquidity constraints and sensitivity to macro shocks," but have not yet reached the level of typical bear market complete sell-off (panic liquidation).
10x Research, which focuses more on quantitative and structural studies, has drawn a more direct conclusion: they believe Bitcoin has entered the early stage of a bear market, with on-chain indicators, capital flows, and market structure all showing that the downward cycle has not yet reached its end.
From a larger temporal perspective, the current uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin is no longer just a problem of the crypto market itself, but is firmly embedded within the global macro cycle. The coming week is viewed by several strategists as the most critical macro window period of the year—central banks in Europe, the UK, and Japan will successively announce interest rate decisions, while the U.S. will face a series of delayed employment and inflation data, which will provide the market with a belated "reality check."
The Federal Reserve has already released unusual signals in its December 10 meeting: not only did it cut rates by 25 basis points, but there were also three rare dissenting votes, and Powell explicitly stated that the employment growth of the previous months may have been overestimated. The macro data released intensively this week will reshape the market's core expectations for 2026—whether the Federal Reserve can continue to cut rates or must press the pause button for a longer time. For risk assets, this answer may be more important than any single asset's bullish or bearish debate.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
