This is a wrong argument, in my opinion.

Shortly after we raised the interest on HBD I downloaded and parsed the activity for honey-swap. Honey-swap is the primary means for moving funds between HIVE and HIVE-Engine

It appears that the decision to raise the interest rate reversed the flow of funds. Before the change, many people were selling their HBD and investing funds in HE. After the raise, many people started dumping their alt-coins and investing it in HBD.

I checked, I found numerous accounts that simply stopped putting money in HE. Users started powering up their HBD instead.

Several of the tribes saw over 95% drop in their USD value. Several of the tribes stopped developing their sites. The appear to have stopped maintaining their sties a few have gone offline.

The fact that users seem to dump their HBD whenever HIVE drops is troubling as well.

In the last two market dips, we saw users convert over a million HBD to HIVE. I suspect that this trend will continue. Whenever there is a major disruption in crypto, we will see people convert about 10% of the HBD to HIVE. This puts a tremendous down pressure on the price of HIVE.

Converting 1 million HBD creates 2.5 million HIVE. (conversion destroys the HBD and mints new HIVE).

I consider the fact that the HIVE market had to absorb 2.5 million freshly minted HIVE during the last disruption of of the market to be significant.