The economy added 172,000 jobs in May. Wall Street responded by panicking.

That number, released on June 5, blew past the consensus forecast of 80,000 nonfarm payrolls by more than double. In most contexts, strong job creation is good news. But in the current rate environment, it told investors exactly what they didn’t want to hear: the Federal Reserve has no reason to cut rates anytime soon.

The Nasdaq Composite dropped 4.2% on the day, its steepest single-session decline since April 2025. The S&P 500 fell 2.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid roughly 1.4%, ending what had been a nine-week winning streak across the major indices.

Bitcoin, ever the sympathetic mover when risk appetite evaporates, traded down toward the $60,000 to $62,000 range.

The chips got crushed

Nvidia shed 6.2%. Broadcom fell 7.9%. Micron dropped somewhere between 5% and 9%, depending on the point in the session you checked. These are companies that had been riding a sustained rally built partly on expectations that the Fed would begin easing monetary policy. That thesis took a direct hit.

The 10-year Treasury yield climbed past 4.5%. The 2-year yield hit 4.16%, its highest level in a full year. Both moves signal that the bond market sees the Fed staying on hold for longer than equity investors had been pricing in.

Unemployment held steady at 4.3%, which sounds benign but actually reinforced the narrative. A labor market that’s adding jobs at double the expected pace while maintaining stable unemployment gives the Fed zero cover to pivot dovish.

Bitcoin catches the spillover

Crypto markets didn’t escape the carnage. Bitcoin’s slide toward the $60,000 to $62,000 range reflected the broader risk-off mood that swept through every asset class not named “Treasury bills.”

In English: if money stays expensive, fewer dollars flow into speculative assets. Bitcoin is, by most institutional portfolio managers’ definitions, still a speculative asset.

What this means for investors

The immediate question is whether this selloff is a one-day tantrum or the beginning of a broader repricing. The 10-year yield above 4.5% is a psychological threshold that tends to trigger portfolio rebalancing away from equities and into fixed income.

There’s also a positioning element worth considering. After weeks of gains, a lot of leveraged long positions had accumulated across both equities and crypto. When the selling started, forced liquidations likely amplified the move. A 4.2% drop in the Nasdaq is not a normal day. It’s the kind of move that triggers margin calls and cascade selling, which means some portion of the decline may have been mechanical rather than fundamental.