Bitcoin fell under $80,000 on Thursday after US producer price data came in hotter than expected. The move took BTC to its lowest level since Sept. 18, with a drop of as much as 1.8% before it recovered to around $81,000. The session was already tense. A tech sell-off in South Korea had hit risk assets earlier, and the KOSPI Composite Index fell 7.5% that day.
PPI surprise adds pressure
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported September PPI at 6.3%, above the forecast. Core PPI rose to 5% versus an expected 4.4%. The release said the monthly increase was the largest since March 2022, and the 12-month gain was the biggest since December 2022. The data followed a CPI reading that also beat estimates a day earlier. Mohamed El-Erian called the PPI result even more striking than CPI. Still, the market reaction was not a simple inflation trade.
Bond yields move the other way
US 10-year Treasury yields fell almost 3% during the day, reaching their lowest level since Sept. 23. That divergence drew attention. Robin Brooks, former chief FX strategist at Goldman Sachs, has argued that yields have decoupled from macro data. He compared the 30-day correlation between upside data surprises and daily moves in the 10-year yield. It dropped from near 0.6 earlier in 2026 to just below zero by the end of August. In his view, markets are more focused on the federal budget deficit, pushing longer-term yields up regardless of data surprises. I think that helps explain why Bitcoin did not cleanly follow the usual inflation playbook.
Bitcoin support levels back in focus
On the charts, two weekly exponential moving averages are back on traders’ radar. The 21-week EMA sits at $76,144 and the 50-week EMA at $78,459. Rekt Capital said Bitcoin could retest both and still keep its broader bullish trend. He noted that deviations below those levels during volatile retests have happened in early-stage bull markets. But those moves came after bullish crossovers of the two EMAs, while Bitcoin is still pre-crossover. Bitcoin also remained below the $82,500 to $82,800 area that had been watched as support. Analyst Aksel Kibar said the latest weekly close near $83,700 lacked strength as a breakout. A weekly close inside the range could resume wide consolidation between $60K and $82.8K, with $75K as the negation level for the rectangle bottom reversal pattern. For now, the market is watching whether $80,000 holds or gives way to the deeper EMA test.
