“I don’t know if we’ll have a recession or not, but a recession would be a big catalyst for bitcoin,” Robbie Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, told Yahoo Finance in an interview, pointing to how recession responses such as increased fiscal spending, deficit accumulation, lower interest rates and monetary stimulus have historically boosted the bitcoin price.

“And it’s catalyzed to some extent over fears of general social disorder,” Mitchnick said. “And that, too, unfortunately, is something that can happen in a recession.”

This week, the Fed downgraded its economic growth outlook while raising its inflation projection while leaving interest rates on hold.

“If you look at outside forecasts, forecasters have generally raised … their possibility of a recession somewhat, but still at relatively moderate level … [it] has moved up, but it’s not high,” Fed chair Jerome Powell said during his post-interest rate decision press conference.

Ahead of Powell’s comments, Moody’s Analytics’ chief economist Mark Zandi told CNN it “feels like we’re being pushed into recession” by Donald Trump’s international trade tariffs. “The recession risks are uncomfortably high and they’re rising,” Zandi said.

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Meanwhile, UCLA Anderson School of Management has published an official “Recession Watch” for the first time in its 73 years of economic forecasts, with its chief economist Clement Bohr predicting Trump “could very well be the author of a deep recession.”

Earlier this month, BlackRock’s chief executive Larry Fink warned Trump’s trade policies will stoke inflation—dampening expectations the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates through 2025 and invoking the specter of “stagflation”—characterized by an economic slowdown coupled with spiraling price rises.

Fink, who has become one of the most bullish voices supporting bitcoin on Wall Street, led BlackRock in its campaign to get a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) approved in the U.S. through 2023, with a fleet of bitcoin funds making their debut in January 2024 before surging to become some of the fastest growing ETFs of all time.

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs broke $100 billion in net assets for the first time in November, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) now boasting around $50 billion in assets under management.