The just-passed weekend did not see a recovery in sentiment in the crypto market. Bitcoin was clearly under pressure from Sunday night to Monday during U.S. stock hours after several days of narrow fluctuations, with the price falling below the $90,000 threshold, dipping to around $86,000 at one point during the session. $ETH fell 3.4% to $2,980; $BNB dropped 2.1%; $XRP declined 4%; and $SOL decreased 1.5%, retreating to around $126. 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 state.
Source: Bitpush
From a temporal perspective, this is not an isolated adjustment. Since hitting a historical high in mid-October, Bitcoin has cumulatively retraced over 30%, with each rebound appearing short-lived and hesitant. Although there has not been a systemic outflow of ETF funds, marginal inflows have clearly slowed, making it difficult to provide the market with the 'sentiment support' as it did previously. The crypto market is transitioning from a one-sided optimism to a more complex stage that tests patience.
In this context, Bloomberg Intelligence's senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone released a latest report, placing Bitcoin's current trend within a larger macroeconomic and cyclical framework, and threw out a judgment that has made the market highly uneasy: Bitcoin is very likely to return to 10,000 dollars in 2026, which is not alarmist but one of the potential outcomes under a special 'deflationary' cycle.
The reason this view has sparked significant controversy is not just that the figure itself is 'too low,' but because McGlone does not view Bitcoin as an independent crypto asset, but re-examines it within the long-term coordinate system of 'global risk assets—liquidity—wealth return.'
Source: Bitcoin Push
'Deflation after inflation'? What McGlone is concerned about is not crypto, but the cyclical turning point.
To understand McGlone's judgment, the key is not how he views the crypto industry but how he understands the macroeconomic environment in the next stage.
In his latest perspective, McGlone repeatedly emphasizes a concept: Inflation / Deflation Inflection. In his view, the global market is standing near such a critical juncture. As the inflation peaks in major economies and growth momentum slows, the logic of asset pricing is shifting from 'fighting inflation' to responding to 'deflation after inflation'—the phase of overall price decline after the inflation cycle ends. He wrote: 'The downward trend of Bitcoin may resemble the situation faced by the stock market regarding Federal Reserve policy in 2007.'
This is not the first time he has issued a bearish warning. As early as November last year, he predicted that Bitcoin would fall to the 50,000 dollar mark.
Source: Bitcoin Push
He pointed out that around 2026, commodity prices may fluctuate around a key axis—the 'inflation-deflation dividing line' for core commodities such as natural gas, corn, and copper may fall around 5 dollars, while among these commodities, only copper, which is supported by real industrial demand, is likely to remain above that axis by the end of 2025.
McGlone pointed out: 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 macroeconomic liquidity tightens, Bitcoin often reflects this change earlier and more violently.
In McGlone's view, his logic is not based on a single technical level but on the overlap of three long-term pathways.
First, it is the 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 the growth of the real economy and cash flows, the reversion is often not mild but severe. Historically, whether in the U.S. stock market of 1929 or the tech bubble of 2000, the commonality of the peak phase is: the market repeatedly searches for a 'new paradigm' at high levels, and the ultimate adjustment magnitude often far exceeds the most pessimistic expectations at that time.
Secondly, it is the relative pricing relationship between Bitcoin and gold. McGlone particularly emphasizes the Bitcoin/gold ratio as an indicator. This ratio was about 10 times at the end of 2022 and then rapidly expanded under the bullish market, reaching over 30 times at one point 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 it is not an aggressive assumption for the ratio to further return to historical ranges.
Source: Bitcoin Push
Third, there is a systemic issue in 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 really 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, during deflationary periods, the entire sector is often uniformly discounted, and Bitcoin finds it difficult to completely detach from this revaluation process.
It should be noted that Mike McGlone is not a bull-bear spokesperson for 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 are not always precisely on point, but their value lies in the fact that he often poses structural counter-questions when market sentiment is most unanimous.
In his latest statements, he also proactively reviewed his 'errors,' including underestimating the timing of gold's breakout above 2,000 dollars and deviations in judging U.S. Treasury yields and U.S. stock rhythms. But in his view, these deviations repeatedly confirm one point: the market is most susceptible to illusions about trends before the cyclical turning point.
Other voices: Divergence is widening
Of course, McGlone's judgment is not the market consensus. In fact, the attitudes of mainstream institutions show significant divergence.
Standard Chartered and other traditional financial institutions have recently significantly lowered their mid- to long-term target prices for Bitcoin, adjusting the 2025 expectation from 200,000 dollars to about 100,000 dollars, while also adjusting the 2026 imagination space from 300,000 dollars to about 150,000 dollars. This means that institutions no longer assume that ETFs and corporate allocations will provide marginal buying power at any price range.
Glassnode's research indicates that Bitcoin's current oscillation range of 80,000 to 90,000 dollars has put pressure on the market, with the intensity of this pressure comparable to the trend at the end of January 2022. The market's relative unrealized losses are approaching 10% of its market value. Analysts further explain that this market dynamic reflects a state of 'liquidity constrained, sensitive to macroeconomic shocks,' but has not yet reached the level of typical bear market panic selling.
Source: Bitcoin Push
The more quantitative and structural research-oriented 10x Research provided 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 reached its end.
From a larger time dimension, the uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin is no longer just a problem of the crypto market itself but is firmly embedded within the global macroeconomic cycle. The coming week is viewed by several strategists as the most critical macroeconomic window period of the year—central banks in Europe, the UK, and Japan will successively announce interest rate decisions, while the U.S. will welcome a series of delayed employment and inflation data, which will provide the market with a delayed 'reality check.'
The Federal Reserve has released unusual signals at the December 10th meeting: not only did they cut interest rates by 25 basis points, but there were also three rare dissenting votes, and Powell bluntly stated that the job growth in previous months may have been overestimated. The dense release of macroeconomic data this week will reshape the market's core expectations for 2026—whether the Fed can continue to cut rates or will have to pause for a longer time. For risk assets, this answer may be more important than any single asset's bullish or bearish debate.
This article is authorized and reprinted from: (PANews)
Original title: (Bitcoin falls back to 10,000 dollars? Bloomberg expert throws out 'most pessimistic prediction')
Original author: Seed.eth, Bitcoin Push
'Bloomberg strategist: Bitcoin may fall back to 10,000 dollars! Global markets are at the turning point of 'inflation to deflation'' This article was first published in 'Crypto City'
