Bitcoin News: GDP Miss Fuels Bitcoin Price Uncertainty As Inflation Pressures Persist

Key Insights:

• Bitcoin news tanked the US fourth-quarter GDP growth, which came in at 1.4%, down from 4.4% in the prior quarter, as inflation measures re-accelerated.
• Bitcoin price traded near $66,600 while 10-year real yields held at 1.80%, pressuring non-yielding assets.
• Spot Bitcoin ETF flows turned negative through mid-February amid mixed macro signals.

Bitcoin news shook as the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the fourth-quarter 2025 GDP data on February 20, showing real growth slowed to 1.4% on an annualized basis while price pressures rose.

The report was delayed from its original January 29 schedule due to the October-November 2025 federal government shutdown.

Final sales of domestic product, consisting of GDP less inventory change, registered 1.2% growth in the fourth quarter. Personal consumption expenditures expanded 2.4%.

The BEA flagged data-quality issues tied to the shutdown: the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not collect October 2025 CPI survey data during the lapse, forcing the BEA to impute missing October prices for the GDP framework.

The inflation side of the release showed the price index for gross domestic purchases rose 3.7% in the fourth quarter. The PCE price index climbed 2.9%, while core PCE (excluding food and energy) advanced 2.7%.

Those figures exceeded market expectations, complicating the Federal Reserve’s rate-cutting calculus.

BEA estimated that the shutdown’s reduction in federal labor services subtracted about 1 percentage point from fourth-quarter real GDP growth.

That measurement drag sat alongside underlying private-demand measures: real final sales to private domestic purchasers expanded 2.4%.

Bitcoin Price Faces Elevated Real Yields

Bitcoin traded around $66,600 at the time of the GDP release. The macro backdrop featured relatively high real rates, with the 10-year TIPS real yield near 1.80% as of February 18. The broad dollar index stood at approximately 117.5 as of February 13.

The combination of weaker real growth and re-accelerating GDP-linked price measures created the mix that typically keeps “higher-for-longer” rate narratives alive.

In the Bitcoin price frame, that environment usually matters insofar as it sustains high real yields, which raise the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets.

CME research noted that in 2025 and early 2026, crypto asset correlations with the Nasdaq 100 sometimes reached 0.35-0.6. That reinforced the view that macro and rate shocks increasingly transmit to crypto the way they transmit to long-duration tech stocks.

ETF Flows Signal Shifting Bitcoin News Sentiment

The largest US spot Bitcoin ETF, BlackRock’s IBIT, reported net assets of approximately $50.8 billion as of February 19.

The fund uses the “CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate – New York Variant” as its regulated benchmark, operationally linking Bitcoin exposure to traditional finance plumbing.

Spot Bitcoin ETF flow data showed large day-to-day swings in early February, including several sizable negative totals.

Negative flows persisted through mid-February, underscoring that marginal Bitcoin demand was increasingly expressed through ETFs rather than direct on-chain accumulation.

Derivatives commentary from Deribit and BlockScholes described a post-February 5 regime in which short-dated futures traded below spot, funding turned neutral-to-negative, and options skew remained skewed to the put side.

That positioning can turn macro surprises into mechanically amplified Bitcoin price moves.

ETF flows in February. Source: Farside Investors

Volatility Models Point To Range-Bound Trading

Glassnode’s one-week at-the-money implied volatility for Bitcoin options stood at approximately 47.7% annualized as of February 19.

Using the standard volatility-to-horizon conversion, a one-week one-standard-deviation move translated to roughly 6.6%. Anchored to a spot near $66,600, that implied a rough one-week range of $62,200 to $71,000.

Extending the same volatility assumption to one month gave approximately 13.7%, implying a one-month band of roughly $57,500 to $75,700. Those ranges were not forecasts but rather options-implied distributions that reflected current market pricing.

Deribit described Bitcoin consolidating in a $65,000-$70,000 range after the early-February drawdown.

That fits a “macro toggle” market in which incoming data either nudged yields down, supporting risk appetite, or reinforced sticky inflation concerns.

Policy Path Uncertainty Dominates Bitcoin News Cycle

The GDP report’s complexity stemmed from shutdown artifacts: BEA’s imputation methods and the one-percentage-point measurement drag led rate markets to treat the release as informative but not decisive.

The mechanically relevant macro variables for Bitcoin remained real yields and the dollar.

Ten-year nominal yields stood at approximately 4.09% as of February 18. The 10-year real yield hovered near 1.80% over the same period. The broad dollar index registered about 117.5 as of February 13.

Those state variables anchored Bitcoin’s short-term sensitivity to incoming inflation and Federal Reserve communications.

Reuters framing around the GDP release emphasized the expectation gap: economists in a Reuters poll had anticipated materially higher growth.

The report was also “stale” because it covered the fourth quarter while policy and markets remained forward-looking. Yet it still fed the inflation-versus-growth debate that anchored Fed expectations.

Market Structure Amplifies Macro Transmission

CME’s market-structure reporting framed the Bitcoin Reference Rate as a regulated pricing foundation underpinning the majority of crypto ETFs. It reported large notional volumes and open interest on regulated crypto derivatives venues in the past quarter.

That infrastructure meant “macro data” was no longer an external narrative overlay, as it could alter flows mechanically through ETF creations and redemptions, futures basis, and collateral costs.

The near-term Bitcoin news outlook hinged on whether upcoming inflation prints and Fed communications would push real yields meaningfully below or above the recent 1.8% level.

Without a new crypto-native catalyst, Bitcoin’s tape remained dominated by macro pricing of real yields and risk appetite.

The GDP mix kept the “cuts soon versus sticky inflation” debate alive, which typically produced range trading punctuated by headline-driven volatility spikes.

ETF flows and options-implied ranges became first-class datapoints alongside spot price for tracking marginal demand.

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