Trump’s tariff threat sinks markets and downs Bitcoin

Another day, another tariff threat. Republican US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he would shortly decide how large the tariffs would be for the pharmaceutical and semiconductor sectors. This news quickly sent US stock markets plummeting, slamming Bitcoin down as well.

The brief rally we saw on Monday was thus wiped out, and the largest digital currency briefly traded at its lowest level in a month. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is being sold for $113,500.

Pullback

Analysts were largely in agreement that Bitcoin should maintain trading in the zone between $113,000 and $116,000 to avoid falling further and moving below the important 200-day moving average.

On the other hand, and more negatively, Bitcoin hasn’t experienced many major pullbacks in 2025.

There was a longer-term downwards trend during April (when Donald Trump unveiled his now famous tariff map for the first time), but crypto (like stocks markets) emerged relatively unscathed by the end of April from that downer.

What hasn’t happened yet, is for example a situation like in August 2024 (after the Japanese Yen Carry Trade was unwounded), is a steep drop and a 10-20% decline in just a few days.

We did experience pullbacks like these during the bull runs of both 2017-2018 and 2020-2021. These drops don’t necessarily mean the end of the bull run itself, but they do shake up short-term investors.

In a weak news month like August, the risk of such a pullback is always higher, so definitely build in some safety. Happy trading.