Bitcoin’s price is surging. What happens next?

For a brief moment, everyone who owned bitcoin had made money from it. On March 5th the crypto token rose to an all-time high of just above $69,000—a level sure to delight the meme-loving crypto-crowd—before slipping back a little. The record capped a remarkable comeback from the dark days of November 2022, when interest-rate rises were crushing risk appetite and ftx, a crypto exchange, had just gone bust. Buying bitcoin on such exchanges seemed like little more than a fun and novel way to get robbed.

Bitcoin is hardly rallying in isolation: everything is going up. Stockmarkets all over the world are near record highs. So are gold prices. Even bond prices are climbing after a miserable two-year stretch. The catalyst is a combination of hype about artificial intelligence, joy at the state of the global economy and expectations of looser monetary policy to come.