Crypto: McGlone (Bloomberg) predicts a market crash in 2026

There are alerts that slam like a door. And then there are the ones that creak, slowly, until they become impossible to ignore. Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, clearly places his message in the second category: for him, 2026 could look like a big end-of-cycle decompression. Not a simple “withdrawal”. A broader, dirtier, more contagious movement.

When crypto becomes the thermometer (and not the gadget)

The central idea is simple, almost disturbing: crypto would no longer be “apart”. She would be the first domino. McGlone believes that the crypto market has already started to turn around and that this turnaround heralds something broader in risky assets.

This reasoning breaks a stubborn belief: that of a bitcoin “outside the system”, immune by nature. McGlone, on the contrary, insists on a very market reality: correlations with American stocks have strengthened, to the point of making BTC look like a sort of over-leveraged stock rather than a defensive stock.

And that’s where it stings. Because if bitcoin behaves like a “risk asset”, it can become the first to fall when financing tightens, when margins contract, when the reflex is no longer “buy the dip” but “reduce exposure”.

Scary levels: $50,000, then $10,000 and the psychological effect

McGlone doesn't just settle for ambiance. He talks about levels. According to him, a first stop around $50,000 is plausible, and he repeats his shock scenario: $10,000. This is not a phrase thrown out for show, he has already defended it on several occasions.

We can contest the target. But we cannot ignore the mechanism: the more extreme a level is, the more it changes the behavior. At $50,000, some call it “normal correction”. At $10,000, the narrative fractures. Weak hands capitulate. Strong hands wait. And the in-between hesitates.

In his exchange with David Lin (The David Lin Report), McGlone rightly places this shift in a “post-euphoria” reading: according to him, 2024 and 2025 were driven by major catalysts, such as the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs and a political climate more favorable to risk, before serving as a final boost to speculation.

The important nuance: he is not saying that these catalysts were “bad”. He says they were able to mark a cycle peak, as a final push before running out of steam.

Stocks, deflation, gold: the trio that can turn a downturn into a wave

The warning does not only target bitcoin. McGlone broadens to the stock market: he points out that US stock market capitalization relative to GDP remains close to historical extremes, and that even a simple return to technical benchmarks, such as the 200-day moving average of the S&P 500, could trigger more general deleveraging.

The key word here is deflation. Not necessarily “prices collapsing everywhere” overnight. Rather the idea of ​​an environment where liquidity becomes more expensive, where the economy slows down, where multiples are compressed. In this environment, the assets most sensitive to financing, growth stocks, speculative segments, crypto, are often the first to cash in.

Even gold, although often presented as the ultimate shelter, does not escape this reading either. The yellow metal recently showed it could falter, with a day marked by an estimated drop of nearly $2.1 trillion in value, a stark reminder that even safe havens can fail when nervousness grips the markets. In this context, McGlone, although historically favorable to gold, judges the movement to have become too tense after an exceptional annual performance. And when an asset strays from its benchmarks for too long, what happens next rarely looks like a straight line.