Trump’s Plan For The Markets: Here’s What Happens!

It’s The Donald’s world and the rest of us just live in it. Over the last week, markets have cowered in thrall to the whims of the man in the White House, hanging on his every word and flinching whenever he so much as opens his mouth. Tariffs are good, Europe is bad and who knows what he might say next?

The result is as you’d expect: everyone is groping around in a cloud of uncertainty, and nowhere is this reflected more starkly than in crypto. Golden age? What golden age?

Everyone wants to know what exactly Trump’s plan is and what he wants to achieve. Then there’s the people around him, all with agendas of their own. Elon Musk is determined to cut government spending via DOGE, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has his 3-3-3 plan. There’s a lot going on in Washington, DC and making sense of it all is vital if we’re to get a sense of where all this might be heading.

In today’s video, we do just that. We analyse Trump’s economic plans and what they might mean for the markets. We dig into Bessent’s scheme, look at what Musk’s cost-cutting orgy might bring about and examine the role of the Fed in this whole fandango.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

In retrospect, it wasn’t crypto, and it arguably wasn’t even macro. It’s politics and geopolitics. Ever since Trump took office on January 20th, his administration has been rushing to implement changes both domestically and internationally. This has resulted in extreme uncertainty among investors, especially given Trump’s mixed messaging about things like tariffs.

Uncertainty just so happens to be kryptonite for the markets. That’s because investors are always pricing in the future. When there’s a global pandemic or a regional conflict, it initially throws the market offside because investors weren’t expecting it. After a few days or weeks though, investors start to understand what’s going on, making them certain enough to allocate again.

Whereas things like better crypto regulations or upcoming macro data are fairly easy to forecast, forecasting politics and geopolitics is exponentially more difficult. The result is that almost everyone has been getting it wrong, and investors are starting to keep cash on the sidelines instead of trying to guess whether Trump will actually implement tariffs or delay them again.

In case you missed the memo, tomorrow looks like it’s going to be a repeat of February 3rd. To refresh your memory, Trump threatened to put massive tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and then delayed them by a month after he received concessions around things like border security. Tomorrow we’re going to get the same saga, with Trump threatening tariffs on both by Tuesday.

Even though most investors probably believe that Trump will delay these tariffs again after getting more concessions, most are not waiting to find out. In theory, Trump wouldn’t levy tariffs that damage the markets, as he’s previously been obsessed with stock market performance. In practice though, Trump recently warned Americans to expect pain as a result of his tariffs.

It seems that investors have finally gotten the memo, and the result could be that markets will struggle until there’s clarity around Trump’s policies, especially risk assets like crypto. Of course, the problem is that nobody knows when this clarity will come. There is a silver lining though, and that’s that regulatory clarity around crypto has been increasing exponentially in the background.

The SEC has been rapidly dropping its cases against crypto companies like Coinbase and crypto projects like Uniswap. At the same time, it’s been moving quickly to acknowledge spot altcoin ETF filings. Meanwhile, Congress has been working to pass crypto regulations, the most immediate of which will be a repeal of the IRS’s broker rule that targets DeFi.

Obviously, these crypto catalysts have had no effect on the crypto market, and they’re unlikely to until investors have enough certainty to move down the risk curve. The same could even be true for macro factors, such as the unemployment figures for February that come in this Friday. If that data is bullish but Trump is still throwing tariffs around, markets probably won’t be rallying.

However, this doesn’t mean that these crypto and macro factors should not be watched or explained away. On the contrary, they give us a sense of which assets and narratives will be dominant once money starts flowing back into the markets in size. In the case of crypto, this is clearly going to be stablecoins, specifically stablecoin payments, with the likes of Bank of America and PayPal reportedly preparing to enter that niche in a big way once it’s possible.

Despite what the short-term price action may have you believing or feeling, these announcements and plans matter a lot, and they will be front and center once the markets start recovering. Again, the only question is when, and it seems that only Trump knows the answer. Let’s hope that BTC falling to the CME gap last week was the worst of it for the crypto market.

💯 Memes Dead, Utility Up? 💯

It seems like the memecoin narrative may finally be breathing its last. Over the past three months, the price performance of memecoins (equal-weighted) has been a negative 60%. Sentiment for the sector is at an all-time low and everyone is back to calling memecoins a grift. Even fartcoin maxi Taiki Maeda has pivoted back to trading DeFi coins.

Overtly degen behaviour just isn’t cool anymore. Looking back, it’s easy to spot the exact events that have led to the current state of the market and it all seems to have started with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin.

While the markets initially priced the memecoin launched by a sitting US president positively, the subsequent launch and dump of $MELANIA quickly led investors to realise how such behaviour from a political authority could potentially spell doom for the markets in the long run. This led to chants of “crime is legal” and “crime szn” echoing all over crypto Twitter.

This sentiment was further validated by the volley of 'political' memecoins being launched (and rugged) in the following days. The final nail in the coffin was the insider trading and cabal mechanics uncovered by Argentina’s $LIBRA fiasco. Not to mention, most ‘trench warriors’ (a term used to describe memecoin traders commonly) have likely lost almost all of their capital trading pump.fun coins.

To illustrate, here are some sobering facts: over the past six months, only 80,170 coins of the countless tokens launched on the pump.fun platform have bonded (liquidity seeded on Raydium). Of these, four coins (0.005% of the total) are currently above a market cap of $100 million; 40 coins (0.05%) are currently above a market cap of $10 million; 250 coins (0.3%) are currently above a market cap of $1 million; and more than 79,000 coins are below $100K. In other words, 98.5% of the bonded pump.fun coins have been complete rugs. The odds of any memecoin trader trading the top 1.5% of pump.fun launches early are impossibly low – unless they’re part of an insider trading cabal, of course.

On the other hand, it looks like crypto investors are finally starting to shift their attention back to ‘utility’ coins. If you’ve been watching the charts for the past couple of weeks, you would have noticed that the most notable top performers on any given day have been $IP (Story Protocol), $KAITO (Kaito) and $BERA (Berachain). All three tokens were launched this month and belong in the ‘utility token’ category.

To the untrained eye, this sudden love for utility coins could be seen as being driven by factors like crypto adoption and fundamentals. However, as experienced investors may have discerned, the markets are predominantly driven by speculation and macroeconomic factors. Much of the short-term price action seen by newly-launched tokens like $IP, $KAITO and $BERA is still governed by hyper-speculation and attention. The key word here is short-term.

So, if you’ve been feeling intense FOMO seeing these tokens go parabolic, keep in mind that it’s always possible for them to reverse in the short term, especially in the face of uncertain macroeconomic factors.

On that same note, it would be unfair to say that crypto adoption and fundamentals play no role in the markets. They do matter, but only when it comes to the long-term price performance of utility tokens. The skill here lies in identifying which ones truly have the chops to survive (in bear markets) and thrive (in subsequent bull markets). This is exactly what we, here at the Coin Bureau, make an effort to identify in every piece of research we publish.

For what it’s worth, one of the factors we’ve identified as being most influential in the long-term price performance of any crypto asset has been the project’s community - that is, the size and strength of its most devoted and vocal holders.

Ironically, the idea of strength in community is also at the core of the memecoin trading philosophy. However, as highlighted recently by X user Loopify, there’s a fundamental difference between the communities of memecoins, utility tokens and NFT projects. You see, at the very foundation, all communities are built on a certain set of ideals and common goals.

Unsurprisingly, financial incentives and price opportunity are common ingredients of all crypto communities. However, during times of market turmoil and negative sentiments, the communities of utility crypto projects manage to show greater resilience than memecoin communities, due to the simple fact that they also offer real technological promise and future adoption potential as anchors to hold onto.

In the absence of this, memecoin communities often turn mercenary, quickly rotating from one project to the next – inevitably creating short life spans (often days or weeks). This is why, at a more macro level, memecoin projects are inherently single-cycle plays. The only exceptions to have overcome this attention barrier are few and far between.

If you’re still holding onto your bag of memecoins thinking they may just make a comeback soon, we warn you to reconsider. While a memecoin recovery is not impossible, the odds that they will stay at zero is simply far greater.

🔥 Hot Deal of The Week 🔥

It’s been a tough start to the year for crypto and if you have stuck around to read this newsletter then you are highly likely to be a true believer in its potential.

Overall, these market cycles we’ve surrounded ourselves with crypto merch to serve as a constant reminder of why we are bullish long term.

So, if you want to adopt that strategy and support our work in providing thousands of FREE high quality educational videos then you’ll want to head over to the Coin Bureau Store. Here are a few of our favourite bits of merch:

* Ethereum Desk Mat: Created by one of Coin Bureau’s internal graphic designers this mat is a must for ETH holders!
* Bitcoin Notebook: Perfect for writing down your crypto research notes.
* Bitcoin Phone Case: Stop getting boring and generic phone cases - check this one out!
* Crypto Mug: We love tea and crypto. If you agree with that statement you’ll want this mug.

On top of that, we have a wide range of crypto t-shirts and hoodies created by the Coin Bureau Team. So if you love what we do then you’ll want to check those out!

🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

* Jack Dorsey: The links between Twitter founder and Satoshi Nalamoto
* Sonic Review: Potential in 2025?
* Top 10 Crypto Apps: Free apps every crypto dabbler should have.
* Retail Returning: When will the masses flood back into crypto?
* Gold Market Update: Surging prices and the potential impact on global markets?
* Altcoin ETF: What to expect?
 
🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* Understanding The Basics Of Souldbound Tokens (SBT)
* Elevate Your Trading Game with the Best Crypto Chart Apps For 2025
* Understanding PayFi In Crypto
* How Solv Protocol Unlocks Bitcoin Yield: A Deep Dive into SolvBTC
* Explore The Top Crypto Swap Platforms In 2025
* Smart Contracts & Traditional Contracts Compared: Explore Key Differences & Benefits

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

It's been a tough past few weeks, but it’s times like these that shape us for the better. Perspective is key and only those that have it are able to survive through multiple cycles.

“If you feel like you’re losing everything, remember, trees lose their leaves every year, yet they still stand tall and wait for better days to come” - Japanese Proverb

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.