U.S. Stocks, Bitcoin, and Silver Slammed: A Bizarre Global Asset Massacre
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
U.S. Stocks, Bitcoin, and Silver Slammed: A Bizarre Global Asset Massacre
Stocks, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies all suffered—a pure “liquidity black hole.”
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Uchiha Naruto, TechFlow
On February 6, dollar-asset investors struggled to sleep.
Opening their trading platforms revealed a sea of red. Bitcoin plunged to $60,000, shedding 16% in 24 hours and falling 50% from its prior peak.
Silver plummeted like a kite with its string cut—down 17% in a single day. The Nasdaq fell 1.5%, with tech stocks reeling across the board.
In the crypto market, 580,000 traders were liquidated, wiping out $2.6 billion.
Yet the strangest part? No one knew exactly what had happened.
There was no Lehman Brothers collapse, no black swan event—not even a credible piece of bad news. U.S. equities, silver, and cryptocurrencies—all three asset classes—plunged simultaneously.
When “safe-haven assets” (silver), “tech faith” (U.S. equities), and “speculative casinos” (cryptocurrencies) all collapse at once, the market may be signaling just one thing:Liquidity has vanished.
U.S. Equities: A Bubble Bursts During Earnings Season
After market close on February 4, AMD delivered an impressive earnings report: both revenue and profit exceeded expectations. CEO Lisa Su declared on the earnings call: “We enter 2026 with strong momentum.”
Then its stock crashed 17%.
Where was the problem? Its Q1 revenue guidance of $9.5–$10.1 billion—midpoint $9.8 billion—exceeded Wall Street’s consensus forecast ($9.37 billion). By conventional logic, this should have triggered cheers.
But the market rejected it.
The most bullish analysts—the ones shouting “AI revolution” and assigning sky-high target prices to AMD—had expected “$10 billion+.” A shortfall of just 2% was interpreted as a signal of “slowing growth.”
The result was a full-blown stampede. AMD plunged 17%, vaporizing tens of billions in market cap overnight; the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped over 6%; Micron Technology fell over 9%, SanDisk plunged 16%, and Western Digital slid 7%.
The entire semiconductor sector was dragged down by a single company—AMD.
Before AMD’s wounds had time to heal, Alphabet struck another blow.
After market close on February 6, Alphabet—the parent company of Google—released its earnings. Revenue and profit again beat expectations across the board; cloud revenue surged 48%; CEO Sundar Pichai beamed: “AI is driving growth across all our businesses.” Then CFO Anat Ashkenazi dropped a number:“In 2026, we plan capital expenditures of $175–185 billion.”
Wall Street collectively froze.
This figure is double Alphabet’s $91.4 billion spend last year—and 1.5 times Wall Street’s expectation of $119.5 billion. It amounts to burning $500 million per day, nonstop, for an entire year.
Alphabet’s stock plunged 6% after hours, then convulsed—rebounding briefly before sinking again—to end flat. Yet panic and anxiety had already spread through the market.
This is the real AI arms race of 2026: Google burns $180 billion, Meta $115–135 billion, and Microsoft and Amazon join the spending frenzy. The four tech giants will collectively burn over $500 billion this year.
But no one knows where this arms race ends. Like two people shoving each other at the edge of a cliff, whoever stops first gets pushed over.
The 2025 gains of the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks were almost entirely driven by “AI expectations.” Everyone was betting: “Yes, valuations are high now—but AI will make these companies incredibly profitable, so buying now isn’t foolish.”
But when the market realized “AI isn’t a money printer—it’s a money burner,” those sky-high valuations combined with massive capital expenditures became a sword of Damocles hanging overhead.
AMD was merely the beginning. Every subsequent earnings report that falls short of perfection could trigger another wave of panic selling.
Silver: From “Poor Man’s Gold” to Liquidity Sacrifice
Up 68% in one month, down 50% in three days.
Since January, silver has traced a curve that left everyone stunned.
It hovered around $70 at the start of the month, then rocketed to $121 by month-end.
Social media briefly erupted into a “silver carnival.” Reddit’s silver subreddit overflowed with “Diamond Hands”—a term for steadfast holders—while Twitter buzzed with posts declaring “Silver to the moon,” “industrial demand explosion,” and “solar panels can’t function without silver.”
Many truly believed “this time is different.” Solar demand, AI data centers, electric vehicles—these tangible industrial drivers, coupled with five consecutive years of supply deficits, seemed to herald silver’s golden era.
Then, on January 30, silver crashed 30% in a single day.
It plunged from $121 straight down to near $78—a single-day collapse more severe than any since the 1980 “Hunt Brothers incident,” when two Texas billionaires attempted to corner the silver market and were forced into margin calls by exchanges, triggering a market meltdown.
Forty-five years later, history repeated itself.
On February 6, silver dropped another 17%. Those who “bought the dip” at $90 watched their money vanish yet again.
Silver is unique: it functions both as “poor man’s gold” (a safe-haven asset) and as an “industrial necessity” (used in solar panels, smartphones, automobiles).
In bull markets, this is a double tailwind: strong economies boost industrial demand; weak economies lift safe-haven demand. Either way, silver rises.
But in bear markets, it becomes a double curse.
The root cause traces back to January 30, when Trump announced his nomination of Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve Chair. Silver plunged 31.4% that day—the largest single-day drop since 1980.
Warsh is a well-known hawk, advocating for sustained high interest rates to curb inflation. His nomination instantly eased market fears about “loss of Fed independence,” “monetary policy chaos,” and “runaway inflation”—fears that had been the primary engine behind gold and silver’s 2025 rally. On the day of Warsh’s nomination, the U.S. Dollar Index rose 0.8%, while all safe-haven assets (gold, silver, yen) were dumped en masse.
Looking back at this collapse, three events unfolded within 48 hours.
On January 30, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) suddenly announced: silver margin requirements would rise from 11% to 15%, and gold’s from 6% to 8%.
At the same time, market makers began retreating.
Ole Hansen, Saxo Bank’s Head of Commodity Strategy, stated plainly: “When volatility spikes, banks and brokers exit the market to manage their own risk—and this retreat only amplifies price swings, triggering stop-loss orders, margin calls, and forced liquidations.”
Most bizarrely, precisely when silver’s volatility peaked, the London Metal Exchange (LME) trading system suffered a “technical issue,” delaying its opening by one hour.
With these events converging nearly simultaneously, silver tumbled from $120 to $78—a 35% single-day drop—and countless traders were liquidated.
Was it coincidence—or a carefully engineered “liquidity trap”? No one knows. But silver markets now bear another deep scar.
Cryptocurrencies: A Long-Delayed Funeral Finally Held
A one-sentence summary of recent cryptocurrency declines:This is a funeral long postponed.
Early February, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan published an article titled bluntly “The Depths of Crypto Winter.” His analysis concluded: the bull market ended in January 2025.
In October 2025, BTC surged to a record high of $126,000. Everyone cheered, “$100,000 is just the beginning.” Hougan argued this brief bull run was artificially sustained.
Throughout 2025, Bitcoin ETFs and DACs (Digital Asset Corporations) purchased 744,000 bitcoins—worth roughly $75 billion.
Compare that to a key metric: total new mining output for Bitcoin in 2025 was approximately 160,000 coins (post-halving). In other words, institutions absorbed 4.6 times the newly mined supply.
In Hougan’s view, without this $75 billion of institutional buying, Bitcoin might have plunged 60% by mid-2025.
The funeral was delayed nine months—but it had to happen eventually.
But why did cryptocurrencies fall hardest?
Within institutional “asset lists,” there exists an implicit hierarchy:
Core assets: U.S. Treasuries, gold, blue-chip equities—sold last during crises.
Secondary assets: corporate bonds, large-cap equities, real estate—sold when liquidity tightens.
Periphery assets: small-cap equities, commodity futures, cryptocurrencies—the first to be sacrificed.
In liquidity crises, cryptocurrencies are always the first sacrifice.
This stems from crypto’s intrinsic nature: highest liquidity, 24/7 trading, immediate convertibility to cash—and lowest moral burden and regulatory pressure.
Thus, whenever institutions need cash—whether to meet margin calls, close losing positions, or comply with sudden mandates to “reduce risk exposure”—cryptocurrencies are the first assets sold.
When U.S. equities and silver/gold reversed course and entered downtrends, cryptocurrencies were unceremoniously dumped—fueling margin calls.
Still, Hougan believes the crypto winter has lasted long enough—and spring is surely not far off.
The Real Epicenter: Japan’s Overlooked Ticking Bomb?
Everyone seeks a culprit: Was it AMD’s earnings? Alphabet’s spending spree? Trump’s Fed chair nomination?
The true epicenter may have been planted as early as January 20.
That day, yields on Japan’s 40-year government bonds breached 4%—the first time since the instrument’s launch in 2007, and the first time any Japanese bond maturity had surpassed 4% in over 30 years.
For decades, Japanese government bonds served as the global financial system’s “safety cushion.” Yields hovered near zero—or even negative—rock-solid and stable.
Global hedge funds, pension funds, and insurance companies all played a game called “yen carry trade”: borrow ultra-low-yielding yen, convert them into dollars, and buy U.S. Treasuries, tech stocks, or cryptocurrencies—profiting from the yield spread.
As long as Japanese bond yields stayed put, the game continued. How large was this market? No one knows for sure—but conservative estimates place it at several trillion dollars.
As Japan entered its rate-hiking cycle, the yen carry trade gradually contracted—but after January 20, it plunged directly into hell mode, even liquidation mode.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announced snap elections, pledging tax cuts and increased fiscal spending. Yet Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio already stands at 240%—the highest globally. With more tax cuts, how will the government repay its debts?
Markets exploded. Japanese government bonds were dumped en masse, sending yields soaring. The 40-year bond yield jumped 25 basis points in a single day—an unprecedented move in Japan’s 30-year history.
When Japanese bonds collapsed, the domino effect began:
The yen strengthened. Funds that borrowed yen to buy U.S. Treasuries, equities, or Bitcoin suddenly faced skyrocketing repayment costs. They either had to unwind positions immediately—or face liquidation.
U.S. and European bonds—and all “long-duration assets”—were dumped in tandem, as investors scrambled for cash.
Equities, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies all suffered. When even “risk-free assets” are being sold, no other asset class is spared.
That’s why “safe-haven assets” (silver), “tech faith” (U.S. equities), and “speculative casinos” (cryptocurrencies) all plunged simultaneously.
A pure “liquidity black hole.”
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
深潮TechFlow
