Just as Bitcoin touched 98,000 USD and the excitement of Ether soaring to 3,154 hadn't faded, the crypto market plummeted last night along with the US stock market. Don't be quick to blame the project party for playing people for suckers; this time it's really not the crypto world's fault—it's purely being dragged down by the neighboring US stocks.

According to historical patterns, the stock market generally strengthens in the first week or two after the U.S. government restarts. However, this time, on the first day back to work, it gave a stark warning: the three major indices collectively fell silent, with the Nasdaq plummeting over 2%, and the AI sector, chip stocks, and crypto concept stocks were not spared. Nvidia and Tesla led the plummet, and the logic behind this needs to be carefully unraveled.

During the government shutdown, two months' worth of economic data has piled up, and now it's all come out at once—non-farm employment and retail data, these hard indicators, directly determine whether interest rates will be lowered by the end of the year. What's even worse is that the people at the Federal Reserve have recently become increasingly hawkish, with market expectations for a rate cut in December slashed from 69% to 52%. Those betting on a "rate cut trend" have panicked in an instant, and Bitcoin has once again fallen below the $100,000 mark.

To make matters worse, Alibaba suddenly revealed its "Tongyi" upgrade to "Qianwen" and plans to create an AI agent similar to GPT. Wall Street exploded at the news—does this mean China is going for open source and free competition in AI? Isn’t this going to dilute the investment returns for American tech giants? Then look at Meta facing cash flow issues, Oracle's capital expenditures skyrocketing, and cloud service providers going into debt to expand data centers. Short sellers took advantage of the window before NVIDIA's earnings report and, in conjunction with quantitative trading, launched a significant harvesting campaign.

However, the real protagonist of the year-end market is actually liquidity. The government's reopening means that fiscal operations will begin to function normally, and a large amount of funds will be injected into the market in the next two months, especially with the midterm elections approaching, the stimulus policy will certainly not be stingy. Several officials have already hinted that a decrease in reserves might force the Federal Reserve to passively expand its balance sheet. Therefore, the key issue now is not whether to "cut interest rates" but rather how quickly liquidity can return. During the turbulence in October, the Federal Reserve secretly used temporary tools to inject water into the market, and a rate cut in December is indeed not out of the question.

From a technical perspective, both the crypto market and the US stock market indicators have generally broken down, with the Nasdaq already falling to the 50-day moving average. If this line holds, the bulls still have a chance to turn things around; if it breaks, then one must prepare for a technical adjustment. The bears chose to crash the market on the first day the government reopened, partly to play people for suckers who firmly believe that "the market must rise when it reopens," and partly to clean up the chips for the year-end market.

Recently, Trump hosted a dinner at the White House for Wall Street tycoons. What new moves are brewing behind this? Whether the crypto market and U.S. stocks will continue to decline or make a comeback by the end of the year depends on how the "key player" of liquidity performs.