Week-over-week performance:
BTCUSD: 70.953 / -5.35%
ETHUSD: 2,149 / -8.6%
US10Y: 4.36% / +12 bps
DXY: 99.37 / -0.5%
GOLD (USD/oz): 4,413 / -11.95%
SPX: 6,580 / -1.4%
NDX: 24,299 / -1.86%
VIX: 26.99 / +9.85%
Looking ahead – weekly economic calendar:
- Thursday, 26 March 2026: US Weekly Initial Jobless Claims
- Friday, 27 March 2026: University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment (March final)
On the macro side:
We are now in the fourth week of the Iran war and markets are repricing everything across the board. Three things stand out:
- Every major central bank held last week. The Fed (3.50–3.75%), ECB (2.00%), BoE (3.75%), BoJ (0.75%), and SNB (0.0%) all stayed put, pointing to Middle East uncertainty. All of them revised inflation higher and growth lower.
- The Fed’s dot plot still signals one cut for 2026, but the market disagrees. June futures show an 89% probability of no change. Some desks are now pricing a hike for September 2027. Powell said inflation “isn’t coming down as much as hoped,” which is about as hawkish as you can get without actually hiking.
- Gold fell 12%, its worst move since 1983. This looks unusual in a war environment, but the old gold framework does not apply anymore. Since Russian reserves were frozen in 2022, gold has been driven less by real rates and volatility, and more by reserve accumulation from surplus countries. That makes it pro-cyclical. The Hormuz blockade is crushing GCC export revenues, likely forcing reserve liquidation, while the energy shock is compressing Chinese and Asian surpluses. The flow that had been driving gold higher has now stalled or reversed.
On the energy side, Brent swung USD 30 in a single week. The Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed, traffic is down 95%+ with over 3,000 vessels stuck. The IEA is calling this the “greatest global energy and food security challenge in history” and expects global oil supply falling 8 mb/d in March.
On Sunday, Trump announced “productive conversations” with Iran and ordered a five-day pause on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure. Iran immediately denied the claim. Markets rallied strongly on the headline before giving back part of the move.
Possible Scenarios:
- Short-term de-escalation: the strike pause leads to real back-channel talks, Hormuz partially reopens, oil falls toward USD 80. Overcrowded shorts get squeezed across the board.
- Prolonged conflict: Iran’s denial holds, strikes resume, and Hormuz stays shut. Oil retests USD 120+, equities revisit their 2026 lows, and the ECB has a stagflation challenge.
On the crypto side:
BTC reached a six-week high of USD 76,008 on March 17, then the FOMC killed the rally.
Price dropped from USD 74,000 to USD 70,900 on the day of the announcement and continued sliding into the USD 68,000–69,000 range before bouncing on Trump’s Iran headline. We are now below all major moving averages (20d, 50d, 100d, 200d), which is not a great look technically.
Key levels: USD 67,500 is the line to watch. Lose that and we are looking at USD 62,527, the February lows. On the upside, reclaiming USD 74,000 would change the picture.
Sentiment is poor. Funding rates continue to be compressed across all majors, and the Fear & Greed Index has been in Extreme Fear for 46 consecutive days, the longest stretch since FTX.
On the structural side, things are moving forward. The SEC and CFTC published a joint 68-page classification framework that explicitly labeling BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP as “digital commodities” under CFTC jurisdiction. The CLARITY Act advanced with a Senate agreement on stablecoin yield, and there is a House tokenization hearing scheduled for tomorrow.
Last week’s spot BTC ETF flows started strong, with seven consecutive days of inflows totaling USD 1.47 billion, before flipping to a USD 129 million outflow on FOMC day.
The setup is interesting. Extreme fear, record whale accumulation (91,000 BTC over the past 90 days), and falling exchange reserves point to a supply squeeze building underneath. Whether it materializes depends entirely on whether this Iran de-escalation is real or just noise.
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