President Trump told TIME, in an interview published on Thursday, that "certain levels of inflation will also pay off that debt very rapidly." Two weeks earlier, on 16 September, the Fed he appointed raised its main rate a quarter point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, by 12 votes to none.

That's the case for bitcoin, made on the record by the man who picks the Fed's chair. A government that owes $40 trillion, the figure TIME put to him, can pay it back in cheaper dollars. Nobody can do that with bitcoin, whose supply is fixed at 21 million coins.

Two groups had reason to listen. People who lend to the government get repaid in those cheaper dollars. People who hold bitcoin are meant to be the ones who come out ahead.

The lenders are easy to read. On Thursday the ten-year Treasury yield touched about 5.34%, its highest in 24 years, before closing at 5.233%. The average thirty-year mortgage rate had its biggest weekly jump since October 2022, and the Wall Street Journal put the bond sell-off down to inflation, a surge in government debt and heavy borrowing for AI. Yields were rising before the interview came out, so we can't say he moved them. The people holding his debt are charging more to keep holding it.

Bitcoin looks easy to read too. It closed the day of the rate rise at $75,731 and yesterday at $84,769, up 11.9%. Gold closed at $4,266.80 an ounce and yesterday at $4,183.40, down 2.0%. Read quickly, that's traders picking bitcoin as their protection against the president's inflation and leaving gold behind.

So we went back through our daily closes for both, one weekday at a time. We have both prices for ten weekdays since the rate rise. On eight of them, bitcoin and gold moved in the same direction.

All of the gap between them sits in the other two days. On those two, bitcoin rose a combined 13.4% and gold rose 0.4%.

If you hold bitcoin at $84,000, those two days are the difference between owning something with its own reason to rise and owning something that was carried for a while.

We'd do different things depending on which, and the answer is in who was buying on those two days.