| What The Fed Said
Of course, Spotify is able to make these decisions unilaterally. In future NFT markets where intellectual property rights are scantly defined and unenforced, artists and creators may not have the luxury of demanding action from any specific marketplace, and they certainly would have no recourse against any blockchain where their content is held.
After all, Ethereum is a protocol. It has no customer relations managers, and code is law.
The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, is a government organization that claims to be apolitical, but whose head is unilaterally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Their meeting yesterday was extremely revealing, shedding some light on the immediate future of the U.S. dollar, and the state of the markets in general.
If there was anyone holding out some sort of hope that Fed Chair Jerome Powell, frequently described as J-pow, might be sympathetic to falling stock prices and use COVID-19's omicron variant as an excuse to unleash more liquidity, they have had those hopes completely dashed, stomped, and trashed.
By stressing that inflation is the Fed's number one concern, we can understand that the central bank's policy makers are likely to continue reducing quantitative easing, and they will probably increase interest rates at their next meeting on March 16.
All this quantitative tightening may come as a surprise, but if we're being totally fair, they shouldn't have been printing this much to begin with, and the current tightening is arguably very late.
It's better that this happen late than never, sure, at least J-pow himself has taken the opportunity to cash out of his personal stock portfolio in October, which may give us an idea of where his motives lie.
Some industry research shows that Fed money printing is one of the predominant factors affecting the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When the central bank prints, assets rise in value, and when it takes away liquidity as it is doing now, things get volatile.
Though price action surrounding yesterday's meeting may have been due to speculation around the news, the long-term trends are quite clear. | 