Crypto was supposed to be a world-shaking innovation that was going to gut-renovate the world’s archaic payments systems. So far, the suffering of crypto investors hasn’t proved contagious. Cryptocurrency meltdown has been tame compared with the cascade of market meltdowns after Lehman Brothers collapse. FTX implosion led to a phenomenon known as an “inverted yield curve,” where the returns on long-term Treasury debt are lower than the yields on shorter-term instruments. Bitcoin may end up acting like the crypto equivalent of U.S. Treasurys — panicked investors flee when everything else goes sideways.
