Scaramucci: ‘Wall Street Got Bailed Out, Main Street Got Nothing’

Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) traded at $84,234.92 as of 9:42 a.m. EST on Sept. 24, up 3.69% over the trailing five days. That has added to a violent recovery week: Bitcoin is up nearly 11% since Sept. 16%, and it rose 6.7% on Sept. 21 alone, after tacking on 5.9% on Sept. 18 as part of a rebound from a drawdown that had left Bitcoin down 35%. Even with the bounce, the price action is ugly on any longer lens: Down 3.65% year to date and down nearly 25% over the past year.

So what changed on Wednesday? And why is the biggest weekly ramp in months already giving back a chunk in a single session?

What Actually Moved the Price Today

The proximate trigger is the reversal of a squeeze. A liquidation is what happens when a leveraged trader’s collateral falls below the exchange’s maintenance threshold and the exchange force-closes the position at market. When a heavy book of short positions gets liquidated, the exchange has to buy to close them, which pushes price higher and triggers the next tier of shorts. That is mechanical buying, not investor conviction, and it stops the moment the shorts are gone.

That is what the week looked like. Bitcoin ETF flows turned positive after a $4.6 billion rebound, per Bloomberg on September 23, and Bitcoin ETFs took in more than $1 billion in a single day on September 22, the biggest one-day haul since last October, with IBIT leading at $381 million. Fresh cash arrived after the squeeze, not before it. Wednesday’s fade is the market discovering that the ETF bid, while real, is not large enough to absorb profit-taking from traders who bought the dip a week ago.

Then there is the narrative fuel. On the Sept. 23 Bloomberg Businessweek episode, SkyBridge founder Anthony Scaramucci laid out his book’s core indictment: The Iraq War funded by tax cuts rather than tax increases, the Patriot Act, $8 trillion in war spending and the 2008 financial bailout of Wall Street, with no relief for ordinary Americans, as three catastrophic bipartisan decisions that created the economic anger fueling Donald Trump’s rise. On CNBC the previous morning, Scaramucci paired that same diagnosis with a bullish view on Bitcoin and blockchain-based market infrastructure. The pitch is that Bitcoin is the alternative to the system that bailed out Wall Street. The price action across the past year says the alternative has not paid.

Technical Picture: Squeeze Signals Over Spot Demand

Traders were watching whether the recovery could hold above the level where the ETF bid arrived. Bitcoin printed $86,594.94 on Sept. 21, and the round $86,000 area became the pivot. Wednesday’s slide back through that shelf, into the low $84,000s, put the week’s rally on notice. The relative strength index, which measures the ratio of recent up-closes to down-closes on a zero to 100 scale, ran hot into the squeeze highs and is now unwinding, consistent with a rally led by forced buying rather than accumulation. Volume during Wednesday’s decline came heavily from perpetual futures books, again pointing to leverage rather than spot demand as the marginal driver.

Why Bitcoin Moved Differently From Ether and Solana

Over the identical 24-hour window, Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) fell 3.36%, from $2,752.25 to $2,659.80. Over one week, Ether is up 14.37%. Over one year, the gap with BTC widens sharply: Bitcoin is down around 25% and Ether is down more than 36%. The structural reason is the ETF pipe. Bitcoin has a mature spot ETF complex absorbing net inflows this week; Ether’s ETF complex is smaller and less active as a marginal buyer. That is why Bitcoin drops less on down days and why its recovery has a floor Ether does not. Solana (CRYPTO:SOL), without a comparable U.S. spot ETF, sits further out on the risk curve and trades with a wider beta to the same market.

The Scaramucci collision sits on top of this. He is selling Main Street on an asset that, on the numbers, has underperformed cash and Treasuries over the past twelve months. Median usual weekly earnings for full-time workers were $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026, up from $1,196 a year earlier, while real average hourly earnings sat at 11.30 in August 2026, essentially flat against 11.33 in August 2025. Wages barely moved in real terms. Bitcoin fell more than 22%. That is the collision the pitch has to answer.

Can Bitcoin Hold $84,000 Into the Weekend?

Probably not without help. The rally that carried price from the mid $70,000s back to $86,000-plus was built on short liquidations plus a single-day ETF surge that has not yet repeated. Liquidations end when the shorts end. Absent a fresh macro catalyst, price needs the ETF bid to show up again in size, and it needs it soon. The falsifiable trigger: if daily ETF net inflows do not print positive again this week and Bitcoin loses the $85,516 area cited in the September 23 recap on a daily close, the week’s rip goes into the books as a squeeze, not a turn. Above that level, with continued ETF demand, the case that the low is in gets another day.

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