Bitcoin crashes below $92K out of nowhere as silver hits new high and gold surges above $4,500

Stephen Miran wants the Fed to cut hard. Speaking Tuesday on Fox Business, the Federal Reserve Governor said rates should drop by more than a full percentage point in 2026, arguing that policy is still “clearly restrictive and holding the economy back.”

The Fed has already cut rates three times in a row, but officials have shown no guarantee of more near-term easing.

Their most recent projections showed just one more cut this year, and internal disagreements are growing. Some Fed members say rates are now near neutral, while others aren’t convinced inflation is under control.

Miran isn’t hedging. He said it’s “very difficult to argue” that monetary policy is anything close to neutral, and added that over 100 basis points of cuts will be justified if growth keeps getting squeezed.

He’s held that view since at least September, when he stepped away from the White House Council of Economic Advisers to fill a short-term Fed seat.

Cooling system makers got slammed Tuesday, after Jensen Huang’s CES remarks triggered fears that demand for traditional data center cooling could be slowing.

Trane Technologies dropped as much as 11%, logging its worst intraday loss since 2020, while Modine Manufacturing plunged 21%. Johnson Controls and Carrier Global also slumped as the ripple effect hit legacy HVAC names.

Last year, investors went heavy on companies tied to the AI boom, especially those making the gear that keeps Nvidia’s chips from melting down.

Johnson Controls jumped 52% in 2025, and Vertiv Holdings gained 43%, thanks to bets on rising AI infrastructure demand.

But Trane and Carrier, both exposed to residential HVAC, have struggled with weaker housing-linked sales, and now the institutional AI bet is cracking too.

Meanwhile, Nvidia itself is still climbing, up just under 1% at $189.33 by midday in New York. Colette Kress, the company’s CFO, said Tuesday at a JPMorgan event that the bullish $500 billion data center revenue outlook from October “has definitely gotten larger.”

Customer demand has risen since the initial forecast, Kress said, reinforcing the idea that Nvidia’s pipeline through 2026 is only expanding. But how that revenue gets spent, and what hardware it supports, now seems less certain for the cooling vendors who were once seen as AI’s silent winners.

Bitcoin has broken below $92,000, slipping back into a bearish trend after another failed rally attempt overnight. Across major exchanges, prices are hovering around $91,770 to $91,880, with Binance, OKX, and Bybit all showing roughly 2.5% intraday losses.

Spot volumes are sliding hard, especially on Binance, which is showing a 7.3% drop to $8.55 billion. Futures volumes are also pulling back, though not as sharply.

On Bybit, for example, futures volume is down 1.92%, but spot is down over 7.1%, a sign that speculative pressure is easing faster than institutional hedging flows.

Funding rates are mixed, hovering close to neutral on most platforms. On Binance, the funding rate sits at 0.9960, while Bybit shows a slight long bias at 1.0408.

KuCoin, however, is the outlier, with its open interest ratio soaring 122% and spot volume jumping 9.36%, likely due to regional arbitrage or short-term retail bets.

On the macro side, broader crypto market caps remain firm, with BTC dominance sitting above $1.83 trillion and 24-hour volume near $60 billion, despite a 0.89% decline in activity.

Ethereum is up slightly at $3,213, while Solana and XRP are also green. But Dogecoin is getting smoked, falling more than 4% on the day.

Meanwhile, silver has extended its outstanding gains above $80/oz, already up another +13% year-to-date. And gold futures surged past $4,500/oz, now up over $220 since last week and sitting just 2% below an all-time high.

Sandisk shares rocketed as much as 25% Tuesday, setting a new all-time high in their best intraday performance since February.

The surge followed Jensen Huang’s appearance at CES, where the Nvidia CEO spotlighted a massive new demand wave for memory and storage driven by artificial intelligence.

“This is a market that never existed,” Huang said Monday, referring to AI-related storage needs. “This market will likely be the largest storage market in the world, basically holding the working memory of the world’s AIs.”

Sandisk is now up over 40% in just the first three sessions of 2026, and has soared more than 1,050% since its April 22 low. It’s leading the S&P 500 Index today, with other memory names also flying: Western Digital and Seagate Technology both posted double-digit percentage gains by midday.

Behind the moves is rising confidence in DRAM pricing power. Korea Economic Daily reported earlier this week that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are aiming to raise server DRAM prices by 60% to 70% in Q1, compared to last quarter. The market’s betting that storage giants are about to enter their most profitable stretch in years.

Truist Securities is calling for more upside in Palantir, slapping a buy rating and $223 price target on the stock, which is a 28% jump from current levels.

This comes after Palantir surged 135% in 2025, riding the wave of the generative AI boom that lifted enterprise software and defense-focused tech names.

Arvind Ramnani, the analyst behind the call, isn’t shy about the valuation. “We acknowledge the significant valuation premium PLTR commands,” he wrote, “but continue to view it as a Buy.”

He says the company’s strength in GenAI deployment makes it a “best-in-class AI asset,” particularly as governments and corporations scramble to make sense of their data.

Ramnani believes Palantir’s AIP platform is in the right place at the right time. It combines proprietary datasets with operational and security tools, letting massive organizations make faster decisions while keeping things locked down.

That’s exactly what clients want right now; not more dashboards, but something that actually does the thinking.

Beyond the U.S. pipeline, Palantir’s international reach is starting to matter more, with AI adoption abroad flagged as a major long-term driver.

Plus, the company’s free cash flow margin has hit 40%, giving it the firepower to boost capital returns going forward.

Ramnani pointed out that while stock-based compensation was a concern, it’s been addressed: Palantir has now posted positive GAAP earnings for 12 straight quarters, with number 13 already on deck.

The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.4% on Tuesday, with Nvidia jumping 2% to pull the index higher. Micron Technology surged 6%, and Palantir added nearly 2%, as AI names kept feeding Wall Street’s tech appetite.

The S&P 500 rose 0.3%, also boosted by Nvidia’s weight, while the Dow inched up 64 points, or 0.1%, pausing after Monday’s historic surge.

Energy stocks extended their rally, building on Monday’s spike after the Venezuela headlines. The S&P 500 energy sector had its best day since July and names like Chevron, SLB, and Halliburton kept climbing on Tuesday, as markets priced in fresh oil investment flows.

This all follows the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro and Donald Trump’s call for major U.S. oil projects in Venezuela, which helped power Monday’s record Dow close.

But the focus is changing, as investors are now waiting for two big data drops: the ADP private payrolls report on Wednesday, and the U.S. jobs report on Friday, both seen as key signals for the Fed’s next steps.

Bitcoin is still sitting strong above $94,000, marking a steady start to Tuesday after briefly touching $95,000 on Coinbase overnight.

U.S. futures are flat but firm, with Dow contracts down just 9 points, or 0.02%, while S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures are both off by just 0.01% and 0.03%, respectively.

That follows a record close for the Dow on Monday, which surged nearly 595 points, or 1.2%, hitting its highest level ever. The S&P 500 gained 0.6%, and the Nasdaq added 0.7%, thanks in part to Tesla and Amazon both pushing higher.

Safe-haven assets also caught a bid, with gold futures logging their best day since October 20, and U.S. oil futures closing 1.7% higher as energy sentiment shifted fast.

Markets are digesting a geopolitical bombshell: the U.S. capture and ousting of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro over the weekend.

In an interview with NBC News, Donald Trump said there will be no elections in Venezuela for at least 30 days, arguing the country is too broken to vote.

“We have to fix the country first… There’s no way the people could even vote,” Trump said. He floated a U.S.-backed oil infrastructure rebuild, saying the project may take under 18 months and would likely involve subsidies for American energy companies.

Meanwhile, Asian stocks are ripping higher, with the MSCI Asia Pacific Index now up 4% in just four trading sessions, the strongest start to a year since the index began in 1988.

South Korea and Taiwan are leading the charge, while currencies across the region are also surging. Investors are clearly hunting for growth beyond the U.S., and dollar-denominated corporate debt in Asia is rallying too.