Bitcoin risks volatile retest below $80,000 after US PPI exceeds forecasts

Bitcoin briefly fell below $80,000 on Thursday as September US Producer Price Index (PPI) data exceeded expectations by 100 basis points. Buyers attempted to defend $80,000 support. TradingView data showed BTC/USD reaching the lowest levels since Sept. 18, falling as much as 1.8% on the day before rebounding to around $81,000. Price analysis pointed to the potential for a volatile retest of trend lines around $78,000.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data put September PPI at 6.3%, against market expectations of 5.3%. Core PPI rose to 5%, versus an expected 4.4%. The BLS release said September's monthly increase was the largest since a 1.7% rise in March 2022. The release said the unadjusted final-demand index rose 6.3% in the 12 months through September, the largest annual increase since 6.4% in December 2022.

The Consumer Price Index also exceeded estimates a day earlier, causing cryptocurrency and risk assets to fall. Risk assets were already under pressure from a technology stock sell-off centered in South Korea. The KOSPI Composite Index fell 7.5% on Thursday. Economist Mohamed El-Erian described PPI as even more striking than the CPI result. El-Erian and others noted that US bond yields were not rising in response to the higher inflation figures. The US 10-year bond yield was down almost 3% at the time of writing, reaching the lowest levels since Sept. 23.

Robin Brooks, former chief foreign-exchange strategist at Goldman Sachs, repeated findings suggesting that yields had become disconnected from US economic data. Brooks said market priorities had shifted toward the government's handling of the federal budget deficit. Brooks found that the 30-day correlation between upside data surprises and daily 10-year yield moves fell from nearly 0.6 earlier in 2026 to just below zero at the end of August. Brooks argued in a blog post last month that markets were pushing longer-term yields higher because markets focused more on the deficit's trajectory than on data surprises.

Bitcoin's price movements brought the 21-week and 50-week exponential moving averages back into focus, at $76,144 and $78.459, respectively. Trader and analyst Rekt Capital said BTC/USD could retest both averages while preserving Bitcoin's overall bullish trend. Rekt Capital said volatile moves below those averages had historically marked pullback bottoms in early-stage bull markets. However, Rekt Capital said those deviations occurred after bullish crossovers between the averages, while Bitcoin remained before a crossover.

Bitcoin remained below the $82,500 to $82,800 area, a key support zone in recent weeks. Analyst Aksel Kibar said Bitcoin's latest weekly close around $83,700 lacked strength as a breakout. Kibar said a weekly close inside the range could resume broad consolidation between $60,000 and $82,800. Kibar said $75,000 could serve as the level that invalidates the rectangle bottom-reversal pattern.