Real Vision analyst Jamie Coutts argues that the current bitcoin market is being driven less by the asset’s four-year issuance cadence and far more by a broadening tide of global liquidity that is only now beginning to roll. In a wide-ranging interview with “Crypto Kid,” Coutts laid out a cycle framework anchored in policy, bank credit, and balance-sheet dynamics, while cautioning that classic momentum warnings and a cooling of corporate-treasury buying warrant respect.
“From a first-principles basis, global liquidity…drives risk assets,” Coutts said, adding that when he regresses bitcoin against his preferred liquidity composite—built from central-bank balance sheets, global money supply, FX reserves and elements of commercial/shadow banking—“you find that there’s explanatory power.” The danger, he warned, is over-fitting a moving relationship. “Markets are non-stationary… The correlation itself is a moving target, so I wouldn’t get too tied up in charts where you’re fine-tuning the lag. That lag period will change all the time.” Even so, he called the connection between liquidity and risk “as good as anything I’ve ever seen.”
That macro lens leads directly to policy. Coutts expects an imminent inflection in Western central-bank posture, with rates likely headed lower and balance-sheet tightening at least tapering. “I think it’s very likely we’ll see interest-rate cuts in the September meeting,” he said.
Crucially, Coutts reminded viewers that most money creation comes not from central banks but from commercial banks extending credit. “They’re responsible for around 85% to 90% of all the new money supply,” he said. In practice, liquidity can be “supercharged” when central banks also expand their own balance sheets or alter regulations to encourage banks to accumulate more Treasuries. He also framed Washington’s friendlier posture toward crypto and stablecoins through this prism, calling dollar stablecoins a potential new distribution rail for US debt. The result is a structural backdrop that, in his view, favors higher liquidity over time even if the near-term path is noisy.
China features prominently in Coutts’ map. He highlighted the People’s Bank of China’s rising balance sheet amid a property-led debt deflation and the government’s push to revive risk assets. “They’re really the only central bank that’s going up,” he said, linking that liquidity to improving Chinese equities and surging gold in yuan terms. In prior cycles, he noted, late-stage bitcoin strength lined up with Chinese equity peaks, and he currently sees “an inverse double head-and-shoulders” pattern pointing to roughly 5,100 on a key China equity benchmark. Two cycles are not “statistically significant,” he conceded, but the mechanism is straightforward: “What’s driving Chinese equities, what’s driving bitcoin? The same thing—it’s liquidity.”
If the structural message is supportive, the tape still demands humility. Coutts called out a weekly-timeframe bearish divergence in bitcoin’s momentum as a genuine risk signal. “Divergences are warning signals… The trend is losing momentum,” he said, recalling similar set-ups ahead of the 2008 crisis and the 2020 pandemic shock. Such signals are probabilistic, not fate, but he urged investors to consider “countervailing circumstances” and risk-management overlays rather than dismissing them.
The host noted that MicroStrategy’s market-to-NAV premium had recently been around 1.5%, adding that Michael Saylor has suggested issuance is far more attractive above roughly 2.0; Coutts’ broader point was that a proliferation of copycats diluted the strategy and left many smaller names trading below intrinsic value—potential acquisition fodder for stronger operators if discounts persist. ETFs, he said, are a steadier bid but lack the leverage-like reflexivity of equity issuance.
“The new buyers are much more discerning. They’re not going to buy the 15th or 16th L1, the 10th L2,” he said, predicting concentration in a handful of credible platforms and real-world use cases. He hopes the industry will “never say the word ‘altseason’ again,” preferring to describe what’s coming as a broader “asset-class bull market” with far greater dispersion. The prior “banana zone,” he added, was a creature of lockdowns and stimulus checks; the “velocity of stimulus is different” now, so expectations should be, too.
At press time, BTC traded at $112,946.
