Key Takeaways:
On May 15, bitcoin briefly dipped to $78,611 after the deadlocked U.S.-China summit rattled investors.The flash crash triggered a market-wide liquidation, wiping out $382 million in long positions.Observers expect bitcoin to remain volatile as the tech war over AI chips continues.Billed as the most critical high-stakes diplomatic engagement between Washington and Beijing in years, the two-day summit concluded with no real trade breakthrough. Instead, the high-level talks served only to lay bare a deeply entrenched systemic rivalry, with the flashpoint issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty casting a long, ominous shadow over the entire proceedings.
By failing to break the diplomatic logjam over stringent U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and cutting-edge artificial intelligence hardware, the world’s two largest economic powerhouses have effectively guaranteed a prolonged escalation of their tech-centric trade war, according to geopolitical analysts.
This hawkish rhetoric sent shockwaves through global energy markets, triggering a spike in crude prices with the U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) briefly breaching the $105-per-barrel threshold. The global benchmark Brent crude surged 3% to settle at $109 per barrel.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index, which touched a historic 7,500 threshold on Thursday, retreated to 7,450, while the Nasdaq Composite and Dow Jones Industrial Average were each down by less than 1% Friday afternoon.
