The current situation is quite different. While excessive enthusiasm for new tokens contributed to unsustainable price rallies, crypto’s ballooning market capitalization was also fueled by unprecedented fiat monetary expansion as central banks pumped trillions of dollars worth of quantitative easing into the global economy to soften the impact of a pandemic-fueled global recession. That surfeit of dollars, euros and yen flowed into risk assets: stocks, commodities, real estate, fine art and, significantly, cryptocurrencies. Now we’re all paying the price for that as an inevitable inflation problem is prompting the U.S. Federal Reserve to remove the punch bowl.
