Will Bitcoin fall back to $10,000? Bloomberg expert issues the "most pessimistic forecast"

Author: BitPush

Just past the weekend, the cryptocurrency market did not experience an emotional recovery. After several days of narrow fluctuations, Bitcoin came under significant pressure during the Sunday night to Monday US stock market hours, breaking below the $90,000 mark, and now further declining to $87,000.

From a time perspective, this is not an isolated adjustment. Since hitting a record high in mid-October, Bitcoin has retraced more than 30%, and each rebound has been short-lived and hesitant. Although ETF funds have not experienced systematic outflows, marginal inflows have clearly slowed, making it difficult to provide the market with an “emotional support” as before. The cryptocurrency market is transitioning from a one-sided optimism to a more complex phase that tests patience.

Against this backdrop, Mike McGlone, Senior Commodity Strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, released a new report placing Bitcoin’s current trend within a larger macro and cyclical framework, and raised a highly unsettling market judgment: Bitcoin is very likely to return to $10,000 in 2026. This is not alarmist but one of the potential outcomes under a special “deflationary” cycle.

This view has sparked significant controversy, not just because the number itself is “too low,” but because McGlone does not see Bitcoin as an independent crypto asset. Instead, he re-examines it within a long-term coordinate system of “global risk assets—liquidity—wealth reversion.”

“Post-inflation deflation”? McGlone’s focus is not on crypto itself, but on the cyclical turning point

To understand McGlone’s judgment, the key is not how he views the crypto industry, but how he interprets the macro environment in the next phase.

In his latest perspective, McGlone repeatedly emphasizes a concept: Inflation / Deflation Inflection. In his view, the global markets are approaching a critical juncture. As major economies see inflation peak and growth momentum slow, asset pricing logic is shifting from “fighting inflation” to dealing with “post-inflation inflation”—that is, the stage of broad price declines after the inflation cycle ends. He wrote: “Bitcoin’s downward trend may resemble the situation in the stock market in 2007 when facing Federal Reserve policies.”

This is not his first bearish warning. As early as November last year, he predicted Bitcoin would fall to the $50,000 level.

He points out that around 2026, commodity prices may fluctuate around a key central axis—core commodities like natural gas, corn, and copper, with the “inflation-deflation boundary” near $5.00. Among these, only copper, supported by real industrial demand, might remain above this central axis at the end of 2025.

McGlone notes: When liquidity recedes, the market will re-distinguish “real demand” from “financialization premiums.” In his framework, Bitcoin is not “digital gold,” but an asset highly correlated with risk appetite and speculation cycles. When inflation narratives fade and macro liquidity tightens, Bitcoin tends to reflect these changes earlier and more intensely.

In McGlone’s view, his logic is not based on a single technical level but on the superposition of three long-term paths.

First is the mean reversion after extreme wealth creation. McGlone emphasizes that Bitcoin has been one of the most extreme wealth amplifiers in the past decade under the global loose monetary environment. When asset prices grow much faster than the real economy and cash flows over the long term, the reversion is often not gentle but dramatic. Historically, whether during the 1929 US stock market crash or the 2000 tech bubble, the common feature at the top is that the market repeatedly searches for a “new paradigm,” and the final adjustment often exceeds the most pessimistic expectations in hindsight.

Second is the relative pricing relationship between Bitcoin and gold. McGlone highlights the Bitcoin/gold ratio. This ratio was about 10x at the end of 2022, then expanded rapidly during the bull market, reaching over 30x in 2025. But this year, the ratio has fallen about 40%, down to around 21x. In his view, if deflationary pressures persist and gold remains resilient due to safe-haven demand, then the ratio could further revert to its historical range—an not aggressive assumption.

Third is the systemic issue of supply environment for speculative assets. Although Bitcoin itself has a clear total supply cap, McGlone repeatedly points out that the market is not trading 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 a deflationary cycle, the entire sector tends to be collectively devalued, and Bitcoin cannot completely escape this revaluation process.

It should be noted that Mike McGlone is not a bullish or bearish spokesperson for the crypto market. As a senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg, he has long studied the cyclical relationships among crude oil, precious metals, agricultural products, interest rates, and risk assets. His forecasts are not always precisely timed, but their value lies in raising structural contrarian questions when market sentiment is most aligned.

In his latest comments, he also reflected on his “mistakes,” including underestimating the time for gold to break $2,000 and his misjudgment of the rhythm of US Treasury yields and US stocks. But in his view, these deviations repeatedly confirm one point: before a cycle turns, the market is most prone to illusions about the trend.

Other voices: Divergence is widening

Of course, McGlone’s judgment is not the consensus. In fact, mainstream institutions show clear divergence.

Standard Chartered and other traditional financial institutions have recently significantly lowered their medium- and long-term target prices for Bitcoin, reducing the 2025 expectation from $200,000 to about $100,000, and also adjusting the 2026 imagination space from $300,000 to about $150,000. In other words, these institutions no longer assume that ETF and corporate allocations will continue to provide marginal buying at any price range.

Research from Glassnode indicates that Bitcoin’s current oscillation between $80,000 and $90,000 has already triggered market pressure, comparable to the trend at the end of January 2022. The market’s relative unrealized losses have approached 10% of market cap. Analysts further explain that this market dynamic reflects a state of “liquidity constraint and sensitivity to macro shocks,” but has not yet reached the level of a typical bear market panic sell-off.

Quantitative and structural research firm 10x Research offers 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 indicating that the downtrend has not yet ended.

From a broader time perspective, Bitcoin’s current uncertainty is no longer an issue specific to the crypto market but is firmly embedded within the global macro cycle. The coming week is viewed by many strategists as the most critical macro window of the year-end—European Central Bank, Bank of England, and Bank of Japan will announce interest rate decisions successively, and the US will release a series of delayed employment and inflation data, providing the market with a delayed “reality check.”

The Federal Reserve has already signaled something unusual at its December 10 meeting: not only a 25 bps rate cut but also three dissenting votes. Powell even stated that recent months’ employment growth might have been overestimated. The dense macro data releases this week will reshape market expectations for 2026—whether the Fed can continue to cut rates or must pause for a longer period. For risk assets, this answer may be more important than any bullish or bearish debate over a single asset.

(The above content is authorized and reprinted with cooperation from PANews. Original link | Source: BitPush)

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Tags: 2026Mike McGloneAnalysisCryptoMarketPriceInvestmentBitcoinBearMarketBullMarketTrendDeflationInflationInterestRateCut