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Key Takeaways
This week we have seen crypto add circa 5.9% to its total market cap since Monday 10am AEST.
Alternative.me’s Fear and Greed has jumped from a reading of 12 to 23 this week.
Chart of the week: Economic Growth trending lower in the US, consumer spending continues to fall lower since Q4 2025.
I don’t know about you, but my social feed has become a lot more bullish and less doomer over the past few days. This week we saw Bitcoin break briefly above US $75,000, coming close to the highs of March this year.
While there have been several drivers’ impacting sentiment, which we’ll cover shortly, the interesting thing about this move is we haven’t seen any real change in the fabric of the US or global economy.
So, this week we’ll lay those pieces out and see what the facts can tell us about this move in the markets.
Let’s dig in.
Sentiment
Fear and Greed moved from a reading of 12 on the 13th of April to 23 by the 15th of April, indicating a potential shift in mood. While we’re not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination, it is valuable to look at what has changed during this period.
Some of that improvement in sentiment may have been helped by easing geopolitical stress, with ceasefire developments in the US–Iran conflict. However, as we mentioned last week, this could also develop into a negative driver for risk markets, if there is any reignition of tensions.
But, it’s moments like this that I start to quiz what has changed from a broader economic lens. The real question I want the answer to is: Is the market getting ahead of the macro?
This is where I start to turn to metrics, like growth outlooks, to try and best answer it.
Chart(s) of the week: Economic growth forecasts headed lower
Three charts this week, bit greedy I know – I couldn’t help myself...but! One chart wasn’t enough to tell the story of how growth is trending in the US.
The Atlanta Fed GDPNow estimate is a model-based projection on growth in the United States economy. It’s provided on a weekly time frame, and acts as a proxy for growth ahead of official figures. This makes it useful as it can be a leading indicator – but this also makes it different from an official forecast. It largely acts as a data model.
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Looking at this chart, we can see economic growth is forecast to slow in the coming weeks.
There are many factors that could potentially drive this move here, but the one we’re going to focus on is consumer spending (PCE).
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What’s relevant about this, is the trend down we have seen in consumer spending as shown in blue below. This is isolating the above chart. The peaks have gotten shallower since March 2026.
Now you can pinpoint stalling spending on what we are seeing in market headlines and the fact that we aren’t seeing relief on interest rates etc. But at the end of the day people not spending, will impact growth – even if not straight away.
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Now I’ll bring my thinking here all together.
Crypto markets, and other broader risk markets are up this week. In fact, US equities are putting in new highs after a few weeks of losses. All while the drivers for growth, like consumer spending, have been falling week-on-week. Even month-on-month If you go back further to Q4 2025.
Markets are forward looking, so it’s about understanding if this move could be sustained with the market knowing that growth is on the ropes. Or if, perhaps, risk assets are getting ahead of themselves.
Now, the counter-argument to that is that maybe we are so oversold already, this move is just a reversion to the mean. Bitcoin alone has seen five consecutive red months until the first green monthly close we saw in March. So maybe a lot of the bad news is already priced in.
What’s your take? Will the market be able to keep this trend higher going, while consumers are spending less?