Bitcoin back at $90K as Trump orders $200B mortgage bond buys, evoking Great Recession parallels

Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett says markets are flashing every warning in the book, but investors are ignoring them thanks to a flood of stimulus from the Fed and President Donald Trump.

In a Friday note, Hartnett said BofA’s Bull & Bear Indicator is sitting at 8.9, deep inside “sell” territory.

Cash levels in the bank’s Fund Manager Survey have dropped to 3.3%, which historically lines up with market tops. He added that investors piled into investment-grade credit, ETFs, gold, and crypto in 2025, all at record levels.

“They all scream sell,” Hartnett wrote, warning that the risk/reward skew for stocks now favors downside. He also flagged elevated positioning and said S&P 500 earnings forecasts of 14% growth in 2026 look like a bet on a boom that hasn’t actually arrived.

But this isn’t like other late-cycle moments. The Fed is cutting rates, and it’s back to buying Treasury bills. Trump’s $200B mortgage bond plan, announced earlier today, adds a second QE channel by pumping stimulus into the housing and credit markets.

“Everyone expects boom,” Hartnett said. “But Fed cutting not hiking, Fed restarting QE buying T-bills, and Trump starting QE buying MBS.”

The S&P 500 rose 0.5% on Friday, climbing after the latest jobs report dropped. The Nasdaq gained 0.6%, and the Dow added 158 points, or 0.3%.

Intel stock surged 6% after a Thursday meeting between CEO Lip-Bu Tan and President Donald Trump. The stock has already more than doubled since August, when the U.S. government took a stake in the chipmaker.

Trump posted on Truth Social that “The United States Government is proud to be a Shareholder of Intel”, and called Tan “very successful.” He also praised the company’s new chip, which was “designed, built, and packaged right here in the U.S.A.”

Lip-Bu followed up with a post on X, saying he was “delighted to have the full support” of Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. He added that Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs, built on its 18A process, are now shipping out.

Meanwhile, mortgage rates fell hard. The 30-year fixed rate dropped 22 basis points to 5.99%, the lowest since Feb. 2, 2023, according to Mortgage News Daily.

President Donald Trump posted a chart on Truth Social Thursday night that included key numbers from the December jobs report 12 hours before the data was officially released.

The chart showed the private sector added 654,000 jobs “since January,” a figure that perfectly matched the data published Friday.

Although Trump didn’t mention December’s payroll figure directly, the post offered a clear directional hint.

By protocol, White House officials are briefed on jobs data the day before release, but they’re barred from commenting publicly until 30 minutes after the report goes live, to preserve neutrality and prevent market influence.

That rule didn’t hold. Traders circulated screenshots of Trump’s post across social media Friday morning, noting the uncanny match and the implied signal. The chart was seen as giving a heads-up on the labor trend, especially with markets already tense over rate-cut bets and Fed ambiguity.

The dollar reversed hard as the day went on. After rising nearly 0.2%, the U.S. Dollar Index gave up most of its gains.

The euro ended flat at $1.1647, while the yen strengthened slightly to 157.52, leaving the dollar up just 0.42%, a slim change from 157.595 before the jobs release.

Gold, which had been down earlier, flipped green. It closed up 0.2% at $4,485 an ounce, after sitting on a 0.14% loss before the payroll data.

Saudi Aramco is ramping up crude exports to Asia, sending at least 9 million extra barrels to buyers in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere in the region for February delivery, after slashing prices for the third month in a row.

Traders familiar with the allocations said this is at least 15% higher than Aramco’s average flow to East Asia over the first 10 months of 2025, which stood at 2.1 million barrels per day, based on Kpler data. Volumes began climbing in November and show no signs of slowing.

The cuts come as Brent crude and WTI try to recover from their worst year since 2020. Brent futures rose 0.8% to $62.49, while WTI gained 0.9% to $58.27 as of press time.

Both contracts are still riding Thursday’s rebound, when prices jumped over 3% after back-to-back losses. For the week, Brent is up 3%, WTI is ahead 1.8%.

Aramco’s latest price drop has made Saudi barrels cheaper than nearby spot grades from Abu Dhabi, making them more attractive for regional refiners trying to keep costs down amid concerns over global oversupply.

India is also getting a boost. Refiners there will receive 2 million barrels more than usual, equal to a 10% increase compared to their monthly average in 2025.

The only exception is China, Aramco’s top buyer. Chinese refiners ordered 48 million barrels for February, slightly below the 49 to 50 million barrels they locked in for January.

MiniMax Group shares more than doubled on their first trading day in Hong Kong, closing up 109% at HK$345.

The China-based AI startup raised HK$4.8 billion ($620 million) in its IPO and immediately outshined Zhipu AI, which had gone public just 24 hours earlier with a much smaller 13% pop.

MiniMax is now the second major Chinese LLM developer to hit the public markets, part of a group known locally as the “AI tigers”. Unlike their American counterparts like OpenAI, these firms are already cashing in on public listings.

MiniMax said in its prospectus that it had served more than 200 million users across 200+ countries and regions as of September. Revenue for the first nine months of 2025 hit $53.4 million, up 174% year-over-year, though the company also reported a $512 million net loss in the same stretch.

President Donald Trump has ordered the purchase of $200 billion in mortgage bonds using funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, claiming: “We are bringing back the AMERICAN DREAM that was destroyed by the last Administration.”

In a long post on Truth Social, Trump said Biden ignored housing while being “immersed” in crime, inflation, and military disasters. Trump praised himself for keeping the two mortgage giants under government control in his first term, “against the advice of the experts,” and said that decision left them sitting on “an absolute fortune.”

He wrote, “Because of this, I am instructing my Representatives to BUY $200 BILLION DOLLARS IN MORTGAGE BONDS. This will drive Mortgage Rates DOWN, monthly payments DOWN, and make the cost of owning a home more affordable.”

Bill Pulte, Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, confirmed on X that Fannie and Freddie will carry out the order. But there’s a catch: the actual cash reported on their Q3 balance sheets totaled less than $17 billion as of September 30.

Pulte said the $200B figure is based on accounting of liquidity beyond just what’s labeled “cash.” He pointed to Fannie’s $12.2B in cash, $27.2B in restricted cash, and $61.5B in securities under resale agreements, which totals $100.9B. Freddie has $4.6B in cash and $86.3B in similar securities, giving it $90.9B in total.

That adds up to around $191.8 billion, still short of the $200B figure, but Pulte says it’s “ample liquidity.”

Markets immediately flashed back to the 2008 housing crash, which was also triggered by mass mortgage bond exposure. That collapse made Michael Burry a household name and took down half the U.S. financial system. This time, it’s the White House trying to make the bet.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin is clinging to $90,000, still in the red, with its open interest at $139.87B (+0.34%), while liquidations are down over 50% at $237.22M and the RSI is a flat 48.9.