Bitcoin (BTC) gyrated around $78,000 at Monday’s Wall Street open as US Treasury yields pushed toward multi-decade highs, with the price swinging sharply after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent addressed bond markets in a live television interview.
Bessent hints at bond market intervention
BTC/USD fell into the start of the US session before rebounding swiftly as Bessent appeared on CNBC and stressed that he had not yet moved to support the long end of the yield curve. ‘I haven’t bought anything yet,’ he told the network, adding that he was ‘fine’ with yields rebounding following the Treasury’s earlier announcement.
That announcement, made earlier in August, confirmed the Treasury would at least double the size of its debt buyback transactions to $4 billion starting in September. At the time of the news, yields fell. By Monday, however, the 10-year Treasury yield had climbed back to 4.76%, its highest reading since January 2025.
The 30-year yield reached 5.269% on the day, just six basis points short of its peak since January 2007. Trading resource The Kobeissi Letter posted on X that ‘the bond market appears to be completely ignoring the US Treasury.’
Ray Dalio flags Bitcoin and gold as hedges
Investor Ray Dalio separately expressed scepticism about the Treasury’s ability to control bond yields even under the expanded buyback programme. Forecasting a future US debt crisis, Dalio named Bitcoin and gold as potential hedges in a LinkedIn post.
‘As general advice, I suggest diversifying well in asset classes and countries that have strong income statements and balance sheets and are not having great internal political and external geopolitical conflicts, underweighting debt assets like bonds, and overweighting gold and a bit of Bitcoin,’ he wrote.
US equities remained under pressure on the day, with both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite Index trading around 0.4% lower as geopolitical tensions over new US-Iran strikes filtered through to markets.
The RSI warning that played out
Heading into the August monthly candle close, BTC/USD held its 50-week exponential moving average (EMA) at $77,269 as support. Month-to-date gains for August had approached 25%, marking Bitcoin’s strongest August performance since 2017.
Trader and analyst Rekt Capital issued a caution, warning of a hidden bearish divergence developing on the daily time frame between price and the relative strength index (RSI). While the weekly RSI had been showing bullish signals, the daily readings were pointing to weakening momentum.
‘if the Daily RSI continues to make Lower Highs, that’ll contribute to mounting weakness here,’ Rekt Capital told followers on X alongside a chart illustrating the pattern.
The daily RSI stood at 70.7 on Monday, still within technically ‘overbought’ territory.
That warning has since resolved in the direction it pointed. Bitcoin was trading around $76,580 on Tuesday, down more than 3%, having slipped below the 50-week average that analysts had identified as the level bulls needed to defend.
