Last Friday’s US July Employment Situation release has delivered the kind of statistical jolt that rarely shows up outside crises, forcing traders to re-evaluate both the macro outlook and Bitcoin’s near-term path. Payrolls grew by just 73,000, but the shock lay in the record-large negative revisions: May and June were marked down by a combined 258,000 jobs, slicing the three-month hiring average to 35,000 and erasing nearly all of the second-quarter’s reported momentum. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that revisions of that magnitude have been seen only during the Covid collapse.
The market’s crypto voice on the issue has been Bitwise Europe’s head of research, André Dragosch, who spent the morning posting a string of warnings on X. First came the news, ”According to Bloomberg chief economist Anna Wong, the most recent payroll revisions were a ‘black swan event’.Will probably get even worse before it gets better…”, then the maxim, “Yes – bad for payrolls = good for bitcoin, at least over the medium to long term.”
Minutes later he argued that deeper revisions could force emergency easing: “NOTE: There is a strong case for a negative June jobs print after further downside revisions which could lead to a 50 bps rate cut in September… Plan accordingly. #Bitcoin”
By mid-afternoon he pushed the point to its logical extreme: “ATTENTION: We are probably just a single negative NFP print away from a significant repricing in Fed rate cut expectations. US labor market & inflation data surprises are still as bad as during Covid but traders only price in 2 cuts until Dec 2025… Printer is coming… ”
Whether Bloomberg’s and Dragosch’s black-swan framing proves prescient will depend on the next few data prints and the Fed’s tolerance for risk. For now the market is caught between those poles: one bad jobs number away from a full-blown policy response, but one more shock away from a broader risk-off spiral. The only certainty, as Wong’s probability math and Dragosch’s full-throated alerts both imply, is that the margin for error has evaporated.
At press time, BTC traded at $116,359.
