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“There was a seminal change in the [Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s] tone at the last Fed board meeting,” Hayes, the cofounder of crypto derivatives pioneer BitMex who went onto launch the Maelstrom investment company, told podcaster Kyle Chasse.

Earlier this month, the Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) kept interest rates on hold after kicking off a rate-cutting cycle in September.

03/30 update: Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, who has clashed with president Donald Trump over the pace of interest rate reductions, could be fired by the president, an influential Democratic Party senator has warned.

“Nobody is safe, not even the chairman of the Federal Reserve,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren told Bloomberg. “If [Trump] can just mow through every civil servant, if he can just mow through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it’s a form of lawlessness and all the power belongs to the king.”

Warren’s warning comes as Trump, aided by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk who’s leading the Doge department of government efficiency in a rampage through the federal government, has gutted agencies, departments and institutions in the mere two months he’s been back in the White House.

Fed chair Powell, appointed by Trump in his first term, has said he wants to take a wait-and-see approach to lowering interest rates, which remain elevated after Covid era stimulus and lockdowns sent inflation spiraling out of control.

However, Trump has called for rates to be lowered immediately, claiming lower rates would help his plan for wide-scale international trade tariffs.

“The Fed would be much better off cutting rates as U.S. tariffs start to transition (ease!) their way into the economy,” Trump posted to his Truth Social account last week, telling Powell and the Fed to, “do the right thing.”

The FOMC downgraded its outlook for economic growth while nudging up its inflation projection and further scaling back of its “quantitative tightening” program in which it is slowly reducing the bonds it holds on its balance sheet.

Hayes, who’s this week been granted a pardon along with his fellow BitMex founders Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed for Bank Secrecy Act violations by U.S. president Donald Trump, believes the Fed is “teasing” a return to “stealth” money printing known as quantitative easing even as it’s grappling with the $36 trillion U.S. debt pile that’s spiraled out of control since 2020.

Hayes pointed to comments made by Powell at the latest Fed press conference that “inflationary aspects of tariffs are transitory.”

“Tariffs don’t matter any more to Powell, and they shouldn’t matter as crypto investors,” said Hayes. “If Trump does 50% or he does 2%, it doesn’t matter, because we know that Powell is going to continue to provide the easy monetary conditions that we need to have our portfolios go up in fiat dollars.”

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Trump’s latest tariffs, which have roiled the bitcoin price, crypto and stock markets, are set to hit goods from Canada, Mexico and China from April 2.

Meanwhile, the bitcoin price could be about to rebound toward $90,000, according to 10x Research founder Markus Thielen, who has predicted a combination of Trump’s softening of tariffs and an increasingly dovish Fed is setting bitcoin up for a recovery.

“Bitcoin is attempting to form a bottom, supported by Trump’s recent shift toward ‘flexibility’ on the upcoming April 2 reciprocal tariffs, softening his earlier rhetoric,” Thielen wrote in an emailed note.

Thielen pointed to Fed chair Powell’s signal that it would “look past short-term inflationary pressures, laying the groundwork for potential future easing,” Thielen added.

“Powell’s mildly dovish tone suggests that the Fed’s put remains intact, providing further support for a recovery in stock prices.”