If you’re an investor, you’re going to want to pay close attention to this video because it may be one of the most valuable things you have seen in a very long time.
2025 is gearing up to be a very confusing and challenging year for investors, and I’m going to show you exactly why in this video. I’ll walk you through a lot of the economic data points that I have seen, which are really quite shocking. I’m also going to cover some technical aspects of the stock market and bond market, and then we’ll take a deep dive into crypto—specifically Bitcoin and altcoins.
Now, what is currently going on? First, we’re going to zoom out to get a feel for where the economy is, and then we’ll zoom in on certain asset classes. The United States is dropping interest rates, just like many other countries around the world, including Great Britain, Europe, and Switzerland. Meanwhile, Japan is doing the opposite—they are increasing rates for the first time in 17 years. The last time they raised rates was just before the 2008 crash.
Unemployment is also on an uptrend, and many believe it will continue to rise. Right now, it’s sitting at around 4%. The U.S. is carrying $36.2 trillion in debt, which probably isn’t a surprise, but it continues to grow at an accelerating rate—especially after the COVID crash, when the government printed a massive amount of money. Since then, we have remained on a steep upward trajectory.
The U.S. economy is heavily reliant on consumption, as we consume more than we produce. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is 123%, which signals an unsustainable economic trend. Quantitative tightening is not over, meaning the Federal Reserve is still selling assets. When quantitative easing is in effect, the Fed prints money and buys assets like treasuries. Right now, however, they are still in a tightening cycle, which they began in 2022.
For investors, this makes it more difficult to navigate the markets because there is consistent selling pressure, rather than the Fed increasing its balance sheet and injecting liquidity. Meanwhile, M2 money supply is rising—though it’s creeping up slowly rather than making a sharp jump like during COVID or the years prior.
There is also a massive amount of U.S. Treasury debt coming due in 2025—a fact that many people are unaware of. Over $7 trillion in debt needs to be refinanced next year. Trump actually pointed this out before taking office, comparing it to 1929, right before the Great Depression. He suggested that Democrats may be intentionally allowing this to happen to trigger a market crash that could be politically damaging for Republicans.
Another major concern is the rising default rates in subprime car loans, which have reached 6.6%—the highest ever recorded. This is a trillion-dollar market, not as large as the mortgage sector but still significant enough to create economic problems.
The Federal Reserve also made a major adjustment in the last two to three weeks. Specifically, the Atlanta Fed revised its GDP growth estimates downward. Previously, GDP projections were slightly above 2%—which is within the historical average. However, the revised forecast is now close to negative 3%. This is a massive shift, indicating that the Fed now expects the U.S. economy to contract significantly.
Looking at the broader macroeconomic landscape, Trump’s tariff wars—which I haven’t even touched on yet—are creating uncertainty in the markets. While there are arguments in favor of tariffs, they tend to be bearish in the short term because they create friction between countries, disrupt supply chains, and introduce economic uncertainty. Markets do not like uncertainty, and financial markets can react sharply to the introduction of new tariffs, especially large ones like the 25% tariffs currently being discussed.
U.S. debt is continually growing, GDP growth is slowing (and possibly turning negative), and inflation is hovering around 3%, which is close to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. At the same time, Japan’s reversal of interest rates is causing a major ripple effect in global markets, as it is unwinding a $5 trillion arbitrage trade so remember I mentioned Japan is now increasing rates.
Why does that matter? What happens is when you have negative rates or very, very low rates, people borrow money—specifically in Japan. They borrow money for free and then take that money to invest in other countries, especially those with high interest rates like the United States.
They can borrow at a 0% interest rate and make 5% just by buying treasuries or other assets that may have even higher yields. It’s an arbitrage trade.
When Japan starts to increase its rates, all of the borrowers say, “Oh no, I just borrowed all of this money. Now I need to start repaying it back because I’m paying interest.” They are then forced to sell, and that’s what I mean by unwinding a $5 trillion trade. Many people don’t understand this, and it takes time. We’re almost 10 months into Japan deciding to increase rates.
The Fed is still selling assets, as I mentioned, through quantitative tightening. Unemployment is on the rise, and if there are significant government job cuts, it could have a major impact.
There are over 20 million government jobs in the United States. Not saying they will cut the majority, or even close to that, but even if they cut 1 or 2 million, that could be a really big deal. Unemployment could spike up dramatically just from the government cuts.
The Ukraine-Russia war is still ongoing and continues to escalate. Debates between Zelensky, Trump, and the White House have created a lot of uncertainty and fear as well.
But the one positive thing in all of this is that M2 money supply is on the rise.
Now, let’s go ahead and look at some economic indicators.
Overall, investors are starting to go risk-off. This is from CrossBorder Capital, but you can see that usually, this has ebbs and flows. It goes up and then comes down, following a 10-year cycle.
Right now, it is starting to curve to the downside, which we really haven’t seen in a while. After COVID-19 and all the money that got printed, we saw this go up massively. Now, it is starting to trend downward, which may be why we are seeing the beginning stages of a sell-off in the equity market and the altcoin market.
Other alternative coins to Bitcoin have just absolutely gotten crushed when many people thought alt season—a period of huge appreciation in altcoins—was going to happen.
Yield inversion is another key factor. This refers to how short-term interest rates behave relative to long-term interest rates. Usually, it’s the 2-year and the 10-year yield curve.
Specifically, in this chart, we’re looking at the S&P 500 on the top and the yield inversion on the bottom. When the yield inversion inverts and then un-inverts, it has historically predicted massive sell-offs in the stock market.
In 2001 and 2007, those dips led to over 50% corrections. Then, of course, we had the COVID flash crash, which was also quite large. You can see this by the arrows at the bottom of your screen.
That is the yield inversion—when it dips below and then rises back above. Historically, it has predicted huge sell-offs in the market and recessions.
The Fed pivot is another key indicator. A lot of people believe that when the Federal Reserve starts to drop interest rates, it’s a good thing because it makes debt less expensive, incentivizing more people to borrow and spend money. In theory, this should help the economy and cause stocks to go up.
However, oftentimes, the Fed drops rates because something is seriously wrong in the economy. If you look at the purple triangles in the chart, you’ll see that most of the time, they indicate an important shift. These triangles mark the Fed pivoting—either pausing rates or preparing to drop them.
At the bottom part of the chart, the gray dips represent the percentage decline in the S&P 500. You’ll notice that before many of these Fed pivots, there was a massive market meltdown—just like we saw in 2001 and 2008.
Now, this isn’t 100% accurate, and very few things in financial markets are. However, if we overlay the key indicators, we can see a strong historical pattern.
Sometimes, a yield inversion does not lead to a hard landing in the stock market, but that is rare. A drop in rates isn’t always a bearish signal, but historically, one combination of factors has been extremely accurate in predicting sell-offs.
According to Henrik Zeberg’s research, three things must happen for a significant downturn:
The Fed is cutting rates (indicated in the green rectangle).
Unemployment is rising (showing economic distress).
A yield inversion is reversing (meaning short-term rates start to normalize).
Every time this pattern has occurred—1989, 2000-2001, 2007-2008, and even during the COVID-19 flash crash—we saw a major economic downturn.
Right now, we are witnessing one of the biggest yield inversions since the Great Depression, rising unemployment, and the Fed actively cutting rates.
I put together a chart to highlight four critical factors that reinforce this concern. If we look at 2007, just before the 2008 financial crash, we see a clear pattern.
On October 29, 2007, several indicators aligned:
Japan had just hiked interest rates to 0.5%.
The U.S. had increased rates and then started to cut them.
Unemployment was ticking up—after reaching a low, it started to round off and trend upward.
The stock market was in an uptrend, but it broke below support, retested that level, and then began a 58% decline.
Now, let’s compare that to 2025:
Japan has hiked rates to 0.5%.
The U.S. has dropped rates and is now on a downward trajectory.
Unemployment has bottomed and is now rising.
The S&P 500 recently broke below a key support level in February 2025.
Now, let’s go ahead and look at where we are right now in 2025.
Japan hiked rates, and they were sitting at 0.5%. The United States dropped interest rates, and we are now on the decline in unemployment. I zoomed in a little bit on a shorter time frame, but you can see this from Co. How big that was! You can see that we are on an uptrend. We bottomed just above 3%, and now we’re sitting at 4.1%.
Then, the S&P went on a huge rally and just broke the support line. This happened in February of this year, 2025. It broke that line about a week ago.
Now, one thing that has a 100% hit rate as far as recessions go is the percentage of the civilian labor force unemployed for 15 weeks and over. If you look at every time this blue line goes up, we then hit a recession, which is marked by these gray rectangles here. So, every time the blue line goes up, there’s a recession. You can see that pattern happening over and over again.
What is happening right now? We are on an uptrend in 2025. The last real recession was 16 years ago. The average recession happens every 6.5 years. This last one lasted 18 months, from 2007 to 2008 and into 2009. I think it ended sometime early in 2009.
If you look at how big this red box is, this was a very, very short two-month recession during COVID. In my opinion, it was a synthetic recession because they just locked down the whole economy. So, no surprise—we went into recession when they didn’t allow anyone to open their doors.
So really, we have not had a true recession for 16 years, which is a very long time. Again, on average, recessions happen every 6.5 years. For us to not have a real recession for that long shows that we’re probably long overdue. Stocks are way overvalued relative to commodities.
Usually, as I will show you on the next chart, the markets go on a 10 to 20-year uptrend, then they go 10 to 20 years sideways. Oftentimes, the inverse happens to commodities. You see big shifts, where commodities do really well, then stocks do well, and then commodities do well again, followed by stocks doing well.
You can see that during the tech bubble, stocks were on one extreme, being way overvalued relative to commodities. Then, at the bottom of the market in 2008, commodities were worth a lot more than stocks because stocks came down so much that year.
Looking at today, we are sitting at a very, very low point—actually, the lowest low since at least the 1970s. It’s almost off the charts. This shows how expensive the equity market is relative to commodities.
What I’m speaking about here is the typical 10 to 20-year uptrend in the equity market, followed by sideways price action. After that, you get another uptrend or sideways price action for 10 to 20 years. We’ve been on a very long uptrend since the collapse in 2008.
So, the question is: Are stocks rolling over? From a technical perspective, we do have bearish divergence, with the RSI coming down. You can see it has a lower high, and that brought the market down. Right now, we’ve had a lower high since March 2024, and we’ve consistently seen the equity market on an uptrend—higher high, higher high, higher high. But during this entire time, we are seeing bearish divergence: the strength of the asset is going down, but the price is going up.
It has now broken the uptrend, and the RSI is confirming below 50. So, if that trend stays down and to the right, that could obviously signal a bigger selloff potentially coming. If you remember what I showed you in 2008, first, we saw a break of support, then a move higher to retest that support as resistance, and then you saw a breakdown, followed by the huge move down after that. So, it’s not just a straight line; it could take place over the next few months because it took a few months after the S&P broke the uptrend in 2007-2008 for that to actually play out.
Another thing I want to show you is that the bond market has gone through a historic bear market. It has been one of the worst bear markets in bond market history, and it is sitting extremely low. You can see just how big the divergence is relative to the stock market, compared to TLT, which is one of the most famous bond indexes. You can see how low bonds are right now relative to the equity market. Usually, when you see a selloff in the equity market, you see bonds rally. Bonds act like a safe haven that people buy when they think equities are overvalued. Investors go buy bonds because they can get paid, practically 5%, just to hold onto treasuries. So, they’re thinking, “Get me out of this overvalued market, and let me go buy bonds for a nice dividend.”
Right now, there’s a huge divergence between where the equity market is and the bond market. Now, maybe you think, “Okay, well Jeff, you’re just showing me a bunch of data because you’re bearish and you want the market to go down.” First of all, I’m not biased—I would prefer the market to go up. I have definitely more long positions than short positions. But as it stands right now, on March 9th, Warren Buffett has $325 billion in cash, which is by far the highest cash position he has ever had.
So, maybe you don’t think this data is correct, or maybe you think I’m biased for whatever reason. But maybe you should take a look at it because Warren Buffett is signaling that he is becoming very defensive. He’s converting a large portion of his portfolio into cash and treasuries and getting away from equities, which he has been doing since the second quarter of 2024. He has been scaling up his cash position, and more recently, he has taken it to the moon—now sitting at $325 billion in cash.
My personal forecast right now (and by the way, this is all my personal opinion, so don’t take this as financial advice; this is for educational purposes only and not a recommendation to buy or sell any asset or security) is that the U.S. stock market has likely topped or may top over the next few months. I’m putting a potential date on May 2025, but if the market heads higher in May and we see new all-time highs past May, then my forecast would be deemed incorrect, and I would probably start to turn bullish.
So, this is just me giving a date in mind, where I think it’s likely that we’ve already topped in February. But, if the equity market does have one more push higher, I think it could happen this month, March, maybe April, or at the latest May. If it goes past May and we start to see new all-time highs in the stock market, I will start to rethink my thought process. I think the market is going to continue to go risk-off throughout 2025, and almost all assets will sell off similarly to 2022. However, I think it’s probably going to be worse. The Fed will drop rates to zero, print a bunch of money, and begin quantitative easing by buying assets by early 2026 at the latest.
The bond market will see a huge rally, like I showed you with TLT. I think it is massively suppressed, and if you look at open interest, there is huge leverage likely holding down TLT and the bond market. When they start to drop interest rates, bonds typically react inversely to interest rates. So, if interest rates come down, bond prices typically go up. I do think this will likely happen in early 2026, as we saw after 2008. At the beginning of the year, TLT and the bond market went crazy after the stock market bottomed.
As the Fed continues to stimulate the economy and financial markets, commodities like precious metals and crypto will see huge historic rallies. As I said earlier, the bond market is massively oversold, and there’s likely a big rebound coming if they drop rates and we head into a potential recession. Commodities are way down relative to equities, so I’m projecting that after the big selloff, the bond market will go up quickly. Then, as they print a ton of money, that “printer” is going to drive commodities like precious metals and Bitcoin and crypto a lot higher than where we are today.
So, let’s go ahead and jump into crypto and how all of this data kind of impacts that. I’m going to just walk you through the four-year cycle because the four-year cycle in Bitcoin could potentially be over.
If you’ve understood what the four-year cycle is, it’s just where Bitcoin cuts its new issuance of BTC in half. That happens just about every four years, and every four years we’ve seen three years of a bull market and one year of a bear market. It’s been very interesting because both previous cycles have topped 518 days after the halving event.
So, that’s what that green box is—after the halving (which is when Bitcoin cuts its new issuance in half), it’s been 518 days until that next high, and then we head into a one-year bear market. That happened in 2017, and then again in 2021. Now, if that were to happen again, 518 days later, we would see a top of the market, likely around $80,000, and it would be towards the end of this year, 2025.
More recently, we’ve seen a pretty big selloff on Bitcoin, down to the low 80s, which is just over a 30% correction. And you have seen that, you know, previously in bull markets, you do see 30% corrections quite often. If we just look at the 2015 to 2017 bull market, there were 10 new highs, averaging about 144% growth between the low and each high.
That 2017 bull market also saw nine major dips, with an average of 34% for each dip. A lot of people are really worried right now because we did just have that first, really major selloff—from the $108,000 high to where we are right now, which is in the low 80s.
This is kind of how I look at the overall Bitcoin bull market: if we are staying above this trend line, I am still bullish. If we head below this trend line, but we are still sitting above previous all-time highs of about $69,000 (which happened in late 2021), then I am still bullish for the most part. However, I’m getting very defensive and cautious.
If we start to break down below the previous all-time high of $69,000, I think it’s time to get very defensive and protective. That doesn’t always mean, “Hey, sell everything and get out.” Right? That’s not how it works. It’s usually a sliding scale. At least for me, on a portfolio, it means scaling up cash and scaling down different spot positions.
Now, are altcoins dead? That has been the big question. Yes, I think most of them are. I think a huge reason why the altcoin market has been held down is because we’ve seen the largest short on Ethereum by far, which is over $10 billion.
And it has been held on, specifically Ethereum. It really started right around September of 2024, and we’ve seen this short be held on Ethereum for a very long time on CME, which is a traditional exchange. If you’re not familiar with it, CME stands for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and they are heavily shorting Ethereum here.
When you’re suppressing the biggest altcoin in the market, it’s likely going to impact the rest of the altcoins. Another major reason why we haven’t seen altcoins perform as expected, or I should say, why we haven’t seen an alt season, is this: In 2020, we had 137,000 tokens. The total number of crypto tokens was 137,000 in 2020. By 2025, we now have 39.4 million tokens—39 million different coins that you can go buy.
So, this was a 28,000x increase in just five years, and the total amount of new money in crypto only went up around 1,500%. We had a 28,000x increase in the number of coins you can buy, but the total amount of money in crypto only went up 1,500%. So, what does that percentage difference in growth between the amount of new money and the amount of new tokens actually tell you?
Well, it tells you that capital is spread too thin in the altcoin market. There’s not enough new capital to go into the altcoins to cause them to really appreciate. There’s a smaller amount of capital, and yes, it is growing, but it’s a smaller amount of capital relative to the amount of new tokens. So, all that capital is spread too thinly, and people are just chasing these pump and dumps. Most people are getting wrecked.
A few people are probably making a lot of money—the few people who are launching the actual coin and literally getting it for free, then you’re buying it and getting dumped on. They’re practically stealing your money. So, it’s a very small group of people that are probably getting rich—like the people who own pump funds that allow you to launch a meme coin in three seconds. Those people got mega-rich; they made like $500 million in Solana in just six months. It was insane the amount of fees they made.
But there is hope, in my opinion. The 2021 bull market also saw a historic crash, which then recovered. Bitcoin dropped 55% in 2021, practically in the middle of the bull market. Ethereum dropped 61%, and then after that went up 186%. When Bitcoin dropped that amount, AVAX went down 85% from its high and then went up 1,500%. Solana went down 67% and then went up 1,200%. MADO went down 78% and then up 37%.
So, the question is: Will there be an alt season? I think, as time progresses, the probability is getting lower. But if you look historically, the alt season in 2021 happened truly in March, where Bitcoin dominance—which is what the chart we’re looking at is showing, the total amount of money that Bitcoin has in its market cap—starts to break down. When that chart starts to break down, it means more money is going into these alternative coins relative to Bitcoin. You see a larger percentage of the total crypto market cap get made up from alternative coins.
We have not seen this chart collapse yet, so if it doesn’t happen in March, it’s a pretty good sign that maybe we’re not going to have an alt season this year. Maybe the market’s just too risk-off, or maybe people are sick and tired of getting rug-pulled by all these stupid meme coins.
Will the crypto market cap recover this cycle? I believe so. And this is the most promising chart right here, which RA Powell posts all the time on X and talks about on YouTube as well. But Global M2 is on a continual uptrend right now. We actually had a correction recently, which potentially brought down the price of Bitcoin. If you look at these charts, they are highly correlated.
Global M2, which is the total amount of money supply globally, is shown by the black line. Bitcoin is shown by the pink line. When the black line goes up, Bitcoin tends to go up. When the black line goes down, Bitcoin tends to go down. These two lines are correlated with about a 10-week lag.
We’ll see if that correlation continues. Right now, the black line is going way up, so that could be a sign we see a pretty strong rally in Bitcoin. If this trend continues, we could see Bitcoin recover soon. If not, these two lines are starting to diverge, and that could be a problem.
There are two things that could help Bitcoin and the crypto market go up:
1) If the M2 continues to rise, it’s likely going to help Bitcoin and probably altcoins as well, and
2) If the stock market doesn’t tank. I am watching this super closely because if the equity market breaks down, and we get a nice dead-cat bounce but it rejects and starts going down faster, that is a very good sign that the market will continue to be risk-off, making it difficult for crypto to perform.
Remember, this isn’t just a technical chart. It’s about overall interest rates and the credit market doing its thing. We can’t say for certain when things will happen—this month, next month, etc. Yes, I gave my overall thoughts, but things can take time, especially when you print a ton of money like we did in 2021. It makes things very confusing and difficult to predict.
We’ll see if this plays out. If we do see the yield inversion and all the other data points I talked about start to bring down the market—specifically the stock market—and we continue to see this confirmed below the trend line, we could be in for a deeper bear market. That could ruin the four-year cycle for Bitcoin, which would be the first time we’ve ever seen that happen. It’s going to confuse a lot of people.
If the equity market holds up and M2 continues to rise, I think that could allow us to continue the crypto bull market and be a little more risk-on than we’ve been recently.
Crypto sentiment is in the dumps. Altcoins are continuously being launched and taking everyone’s money. BTC is likely to continue its move up towards $180K, in my opinion, if liquidity continues and stocks do not dump. I believe the alt season is coming, but only for the top few projects—those primarily in the top 200 by market cap and focused on utility. Yes, some of the top blue-chip memes could do well, but I think primarily projects in AI or real-world assets would do well if an alt season does occur.
If that doesn’t happen in March, then I think the probability of an alt season is going way down. So, I’m watching what happens this month in March with altcoins. If we don’t see them rally relative to Bitcoin, or if we see the equity market starting to sell off quicker, that’s going to lower the probability of an alt season in my opinion.
And if the stock market pulls down, crypto will follow. The printer’s coming either way. So, anytime there’s pain in the economy or stock market, what happens? They print a lot of money and lower interest rates. That drives every asset in the world—liquidity. When liquidity picks up, risk assets like crypto will go crazy.
That’s why I was saying that even if we do see a collapse, if it’s really bad, we’re going to see them print money and lower interest rates, which will likely lead to a lot higher prices—especially for commodities, precious metals, and crypto. You’ll probably see a strong equity rebound as well, depending on how low we go.
Thank you so much for watching. If you got value from this type of research, I do run a small community in a signals-based program, where I talk about charts, technical setups, and how I take this data to make decisions. I spend hundreds of hours studying the market because this is what I do professionally. If you think you would get value from this data and understanding the setups I personally take, there’s a link in the description below.
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Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video!
