📌 MAROKO133 Breaking crypto: Powell’s Final FOMC: Grading His Wins, Losses, and th
Jerome Powell will gavel his last FOMC press conference on Wednesday, closing eight years atop the Federal Reserve with rates frozen at 3.50 to 3.75 percent and headline inflation back at 3.3%.
His successor, Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick, walks into a corner office stacked with unfinished business, an oil-driven CPI spike, a $6.7 trillion balance sheet, and a crypto market that learned to live and die by Fed liquidity.
Powell vs Yellen: The Inheritance Gap
Janet Yellen handed Powell calm waters in February 2018. Rates sat near 1.5%, headline inflation hugged the 2% target, and the balance sheet was already shrinking by design.
Powell took over as a former lawyer and private equity executive, not an academic economist. He inherited a soft landing in progress and tried to keep it going with gradual hikes through 2018 before the trade war forced a pivot.
Here is a wild fact I just learned.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who is costing us billions because he refuses to lower the interest rates, background isn’t even in economics.
Yellen’s four years produced no recessions and almost no surprises. Powell’s eight years included a pandemic shutdown, the largest balance sheet in history, the worst inflation reading since 1981, and three regional bank failures inside ten days.
The Wins: From Pandemic Rescue to a Near-Soft Landing
Powell’s defenders point to March 2020 as his strongest hour. The Fed cut rates to zero, restarted asset purchases, and stood up nine emergency lending facilities in less than three weeks.
“Powell pushed back against some mild hawkish resistance to the jumbo emergency rate cut on March 15, 2020,” highlighted economist Nick Timiraos.
That liquidity wave saved markets and arguably saved Bitcoin’s first institutional cycle. Bitcoin (BTC) climbed from roughly $5,000 in March 2020 to a November 2021 peak above $69,000, tracking the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet toward $9 trillion.
The second redemption arc came later. Powell ran the most aggressive tightening cycle since Paul Volcker, taking the policy rate from zero to 5.5% without triggering a deep recession or a labor collapse.
21 months in to a Volckers initial agressive hiking cycle he pivoted as a mini growth recession commenced. Only to reignite inflation. Powell has pivoted in spirit and had no recession at all to deal with. Wonder how that will go pic.twitter.com/ko5Z1qEbo7
By late 2024 he also reframed the official tone on digital assets. At the DealBook Summit, Powell called Bitcoin “like gold, only it’s virtual,” a single sentence that helped push BTC above $103,000 inside a session.
“It’s just like gold only it’s virtual. People are not using it as a form of payment, or as a store of value. It’s highly volatile. It’s not a competitor for the dollar, it’s really a competitor for gold,” Powell said.
The Losses: Transitory Inflation and the Bank Scare
The “transitory” call of 2021 still defines the criticism. Powell waited until March 2022 to start hiking even as Consumer Price Index (CPI) prints exceeded 7%, a delay Warsh has called a “fatal policy error.”
“Once you let inflation take hold in the economy, it is more expensive and harder to bring it down, and so the fatal policy error going back four or five years is still a legacy that we are dealing with… we need a regime change in the conduct of policy,” stated Kevin Warsh, testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, April 21
“JAYPOW [Jerome Powell] might have broken US banking system. 2008 it was a banks portfolios of bad credit – aka subprime. 2023 it was banks portfolios of long duration bonds like UST and MBS??? If it goes down then…
📌 MAROKO133 Hot crypto: XRP NEWS: GraniteShares Just Delayed Its 3x XRP ETF for th
GraniteShares has pushed its 3x Long and 3x Short XRP ETF launch to May 7, the fifth delay in three weeks, and this is bearish news for XRP.
XRP is feeling the regulatory overhang, with traders watching closely to see whether institutional-grade leverage products ever actually arrive. The delay isn’t just an XRP story. It’s a signal about where the SEC stands on leveraged crypto exposure in 2026.
The effective launch date has shifted from April 2 → April 9 → April 16 → April 23 → now May 7.
The filing was submitted under SEC Rule 485, a mechanism that allows issuers to move effective dates without restarting the full registration process.
Critically, all eight leveraged fundsin the same filing, 3x Long and 3x Short versions for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP, were moved simultaneously. Whatever the SEC is working through, it targets the 3x structure itself, not XRP specifically.
Can XRP Price Hold Support as ETF Delays Pile Up?
XRP is sitting at $1.428 on the daily chart, and the most interesting thing happening right now is that the 9 and 21 MA are crossing bullish for the first time since the August peak, with price sitting just above both moving averages after months of trading below them.
Every previous MA cross on this chart played out exactly as expected; the blue dots mark each crossover, and they all led to meaningful moves in the direction of the cross, which makes the current setup worth paying attention to.
The problem is the broader structure. XRP has been in a downtrend since August, printing lower highs the entire way from $3.40 down to the February low near $1.07, and the current recovery is still well below every significant prior level.
The $1.50 zone is the immediate ceiling that has been capping price for weeks, and above that the $1.90 to $2.00 area is where real resistance starts stacking up from the previous distribution zone.
If the MA cross holds and price can clear $1.50 with conviction, the setup starts to look like a genuine trend reversal attempt rather than just another dead cat bounce in a longer downtrend.
But until $1.50 flips and the MAs stay bullishly crossed, this is still a recovery inside a downtrend, and the burden of proof sits with the bulls.
When XRP News Get Boring, Capital Rotates to New Shiny Things Like Maxi Doge
XRP’s ETF delay pushes the timeline out again, and that matters because a lot of capital was positioned for a quick catalyst.
When that kind of trade disappears, it does not sit idle, it rotates, usually into higher-risk setups with faster potential upside.
Maxi Doge is leaning directly into that rotation. It is built around the high-leverage trader mindset, targeting the same crowd that chases fast-moving narratives and short-term catalysts. The presale sits around $0.0002815 with roughly $4.75M raised, showing steady inflows rather than a one-time spike.
The setup is designed to keep momentum alive, with staking, trading competitions, and a treasury aimed at fueling liquidity and partnerships. The branding is aggressive and intentional, built to spread quickly in the same circles that react to ETF headlines.
At this stage, the appeal is simple, it is early, it is narrative-driven, and it sits right where capital tends to rotate when larger catalysts get delayed.
