Keep your eyes on the claims

Within crypto, we've seen historic levels of correlation between bitcoin and broader equities; granted, now just exhibiting low levels of correlated. Last week, The Block's Larry Cermak found that bitcoin's correlation to the S&P500 index on hourly return data clocked in at .32 for the month of March. While the monthly correlation is still relatively low, it is statistically significant, and could suggest broader movements in risk-on/off tones expressed via the S&P500 could also be showing up within bitcoin return data.

And yet, with this week's print of more than 6.6 million incremental initial jobless claims for the week of March 28th, almost 6 million people larger than the prior record set in 1982 (before last week's 3.3 million record) and nearly 10 million new claims in just two weeks, it's hard to see how prior relationships between jobless claims and the stock market index should be expected to hold true in this crisis.