On February 6, dollar asset investors had difficulty sleeping.

Upon opening the trading software, the screen was filled with blood red. Bitcoin once dropped to $60,000, evaporating 16% in 24 hours and down 50% from its previous high.

Silver plummeted like a kite with a broken string, crashing 17% in a single day. The Nasdaq dropped 1.5%, and tech stocks were in distress everywhere.

In the crypto market, 580,000 people liquidated, and $2.6 billion vanished.

But the strangest part was: no one knows exactly what happened?

There was no Lehman collapse, no black swan events, and not even any decent bad news. US stocks, silver, and cryptocurrencies all collectively dived at the same time.

When “safe haven assets” (silver), “tech faith” (US stocks), and “speculative casinos” (cryptocurrencies) all plummet simultaneously, the one message the market may be conveying is: Liquidity is gone.

US Stocks: The bubble bursts during earnings season

After the market closed on February 4, AMD delivered a fantastic earnings report: revenue and profit all exceeded expectations. CEO Lisa Su stated on the conference call: We are entering 2026 with strong momentum.

Then the stock price plummeted 17%.

What was the problem? Q1 revenue guidance was $9.5 billion to $10.1 billion, with a mid-point of $9.8 billion. This number exceeded Wall Street’s consensus estimate ($9.37 billion), and ordinarily, this should elicit cheers.

But the market did not approve.

The most aggressive analysts, those shouting “AI revolution,” and giving AMD sky-high target prices, were expecting “$10 billion+.” Being short by 2% in their eyes was a signal of “slowing growth.”

The result was a full-on stampede. AMD plummeted 17%, losing hundreds of billions in market capitalization overnight; the Philadelphia semiconductor index dropped over 6%; Micron Technology fell over 9%, SanDisk crashed 16%, and Western Digital fell 7%.

The entire chip sector was dragged down by just AMD.

AMD's wounds weren’t even healed, and Alphabet struck another blow.

After the market closed on February 6, Google's parent company released its financial report. Revenue and profit were again broadly above expectations, cloud business grew 48%, and CEO Sundar Pichai was brimming with confidence: AI is driving growth across all our businesses. Then, CFO Anat Ashkenazi threw out a figure: “In 2026, we plan to invest $175 to $185 billion in capital expenditures.”

Wall Street was collectively stunned.

This figure is double Alphabet's previous year ($91.4 billion) and 1.5 times greater than Wall Street's expectation ($119.5 billion). Equivalent to burning $500 million a day, continuously for a whole year.

Alphabet's stock price dropped 6% after hours, then bounced and fell again, eventually managing to stay flat, but panic and worry had already spread through the market.

This is the real AI arms race of 2026: Google burns $180 billion, Meta burns $115 to $135 billion, and Microsoft and Amazon are also throwing money around recklessly. The four major tech giants are set to burn over $500 billion this year.

But no one knows where the endpoint of this arms race lies. It's like two people shoving each other at the edge of a cliff; whoever stops first will be pushed off.

The gains of the seven tech giants in 2025 were almost entirely from "AI expectations." Everyone is betting: although it's expensive now, AI will make these companies incredibly profitable, so buying now isn't a loss.

But when the market realizes that “AI is not a money printer, but a money burner,” the high capital expenditures at inflated valuations become a Damocles' sword hanging overhead.

AMD is just the beginning. From now on, every less-than-perfect earnings report could trigger a new round of stampede.

Silver: From "poor man’s gold" to liquidity sacrificial offering

A 68% increase in a month, a 50% drop in three days.

Since January, silver has displayed a curve that has left everyone speechless.

At the beginning of the month, it hovered around $70, and by the end of the month, it surged to $121.

Social media once kicked off a "silver frenzy." The silver section on Reddit was filled with “Diamond Hands” (indicating steadfast holders), and Twitter was flooded with posts saying “silver is going to the moon,” “industrial demand is exploding,” and “solar panels can't do without silver.”

Many people genuinely believed “this time is different.” The genuine industrial demands for solar energy, AI data centers, and electric vehicles, along with five consecutive years of supply deficits, all looked like it was the golden era for silver.

Then on January 30, silver crashed 30% in one day.

It fell directly from $121 to around $78. This was silver's most severe single-day crash since the “Hunt Brothers incident” in 1980. That year, two wealthy Texans attempted to corner the silver market but ended up being forcibly liquidated by the exchanges, resulting in a market collapse.

Forty-five years later, history has repeated itself.

On February 6, silver dropped another 17%. Those who “bought the dip” at $90 watched helplessly as their money evaporated again.

Silver is quite special; it is both "poor man's gold" (a safe-haven asset) and an "industrial necessity" (used for solar panels, phones, and cars).

In a bull market, this is a double blessing: when the economy is good, industrial demand is strong; when the economy is poor, safe-haven demand rises. It can rise in any situation.

But once it enters a bear market, it becomes a double curse.

The source of the crash goes back to January 30, when Trump announced the nomination of Kevin Warsh for the new Federal Reserve Chair. Silver plummeted 31.4% that day, marking its largest single-day decline since 1980.

Warsh is a well-known hawk who advocates maintaining high interest rates to control inflation. His nomination means that market concerns about "the Federal Reserve losing independence," "disordered monetary policy," and "out-of-control inflation" instantly cooled, and these concerns were precisely the core driving force behind gold and silver's explosive rise in 2025. On the day of Warsh's nomination, the dollar index rose 0.8%, and all safe-haven assets (gold, silver, yen) were simultaneously sold off.

Looking back at this crash, three events occurred in quick succession within 48 hours.

On January 30, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange suddenly announced: silver margin requirements would rise from 11% to 15%, and gold from 6% to 8%.

Meanwhile, market makers began to retreat.

Saxo Bank's commodity strategy head Ole Hansen bluntly stated: “When volatility is too high, banks and brokers will exit the market to manage their risks, and this retreat will exacerbate price volatility, triggering stop-loss orders, margin calls, and forced sell-offs.”

The strangest thing was that just when silver was experiencing the most extreme volatility, the London Metal Exchange's trading system suddenly “encountered technical issues,” delaying the opening by an hour.

A few things stacked on nearly the same day, silver dropped from $120 to $78, a single-day drop of 35%, causing countless people to liquidate.

Was it a coincidence, or was someone’s carefully designed “liquidity trap”? No one knows the answer. But the silver market has left a deep scar ever since.

Cryptocurrency: The delayed funeral is finally held

In summary, the recent continued crash of cryptocurrencies can be described in one sentence: This is a delayed funeral.

In early February, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan published an article titled “The Depths of Crypto Winter,” in which his analysis concluded that the bull market ended as early as January 2025.

In October 2025, BTC surged to a historical high of $126,000, and everyone cheered that “$100,000 is just the beginning,” while Hougan believed that this brief bull market was artificially sustained.

Throughout 2025, Bitcoin ETFs and digital asset treasury companies bought a total of 744,000 Bitcoins, worth about $75 billion.

In comparison, the newly mined Bitcoin output throughout 2025 was about 160,000 coins (post-halving). In other words, institutions bought 4.6 times the new supply.

In Hougan’s view, without this $75 billion of buying pressure, Bitcoin could have fallen 60% by mid-2025.

The funeral was delayed for 9 months, but it was bound to happen.

But why, in comparison, did cryptocurrency fall the hardest?

In the "asset list" of institutions, there is an invisible ranking:

Core assets: US Treasuries, gold, blue chips, sold last during crises.

Secondary core assets: corporate bonds, large-cap stocks, real estate, sold during liquidity crunches.

Marginal assets: small-cap stocks, commodity futures, and cryptocurrencies, the first to be sacrificed.

In the face of a liquidity crisis, cryptocurrencies are always the first to be sacrificed.

This is also due to the characteristics of cryptocurrencies themselves. They have the best liquidity, trade 24/7, can be converted to cash at any time, and bear the lightest moral burden with the least regulatory pressure.

So whenever institutions need cash, whether to meet margin calls, liquidate, or because the boss suddenly orders to “reduce risk exposure,” the first to be sold off is always cryptocurrency.

When US stocks, gold, and silver's trends reverse and enter a downward trend, cryptocurrencies are also innocently sold off, becoming fuel for margin calls.

However, Hougan also believes that the crypto winter has lasted for a long time, and spring is certainly not far away.

The real epicenter: Japan's overlooked time bomb?

Everyone is looking for the culprit: was it AMD's earnings report? Was it Alphabet’s spending? Was it Trump's nomination for the Federal Reserve Chair?

The real epicenter may have been planted as early as January 20.

On that day, the yield on Japan’s 40-year government bonds surpassed 4%, the first time since this term was issued in 2007, and the first time any Japanese government bond has surpassed 4% in over 30 years.

For decades, Japanese government bonds have been the "safety net" of the global financial system. With interest rates near zero, even negative, they were as stable as a rock.

Global hedge funds, pensions, and insurance companies have all been playing a game known as "yen carry trade":

Borrowing yen at super-low interest rates in Japan, converting to dollars, buying US Treasuries, tech stocks, or cryptocurrencies, and then earning the interest spread.

As long as the yield on Japanese government bonds doesn't change, this game can go on indefinitely. How large is the market scale? No one could say for sure, but conservative estimates put it at least several trillion dollars.

As the yen entered an interest rate hike cycle, the scale of the yen carry trade gradually shrank, but after January 20, this arbitrage game directly entered hell mode, even liquidation mode.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced early elections, promising tax cuts and increased fiscal spending, but the problem is that Japan's government debt-to-GDP ratio has already reached 240%, the highest in the world. If taxes are cut, what will they use to pay off debts?

The market exploded; Japanese government bonds were wildly sold off, causing yields to soar. The yield on 40-year government bonds increased by 25 basis points in one day, a volatility not seen in Japan in 30 years.

When Japanese government bonds collapsed, the chain reaction began:

The yen appreciated, and those funds that borrowed yen to buy US Treasuries, stocks, and Bitcoin suddenly found their repayment costs skyrocketing. They either had to liquidate to cut losses immediately or face liquidation.

US Treasuries, European bonds, and all “long-duration assets” were also sold off in kind because investors needed cash.

Stocks, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies all suffered. When even “risk-free assets” are being sold off, other assets naturally fare no better.

That is why “safe haven assets” (silver), “tech faith” (US stocks), and “speculative casinos” (cryptocurrencies) all collectively plunged at the same time.

A pure “liquidity black hole.”