Bitcoin (BTC) remains largely unchanged after shrugging off yesterday’s equity market meltdown, after reports surfaced that Donald Trump was considering sacking Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
According to Bloomberg, Trump was frustrated with the Fed’s reluctance to cut interest rates and had discussed Powell’s removal with close advisers.
The market mood later stabilised after Trump said it was “highly unlikely” he would remove Powell, though he added a caveat, suggesting action could be taken if fraud was discovered in the Fed’s ongoing building renovation project.
By 09:15 GMT on Wednesday, Bitcoin was trading at $118,245, down 0.3% on the day..
In separate news, a former officer of the UK’s National Crime Agency has been jailed after stealing Bitcoin during a criminal investigation. Paul Chowles, 42, from Bristol, was sentenced to five and a half years after transferring nearly £60,000 worth of seized Bitcoin to his own accounts via the dark web.
Chowles was involved in a 2013 NCA operation that targeted illegal sales on the Silk Road marketplace, leading to the arrest of Thomas White. Investigators later discovered 50 Bitcoin had vanished from a seized wallet, initially suspecting White had remotely accessed it. However, an internal probe uncovered Chowles as the thief.
The stolen Bitcoin ballooned in value to more than £4.4 million by the time of sentencing, with the Crown Prosecution Service calculating Chowles had spent over £144,000 before his arrest