“Canada may offer the sharpest glimpse of the future—and the business opportunities—for financial-services companies willing to take the risk.”
“China said this week it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.”
“Someone started arbitrarily and aggressively buying stocks and the decline was halved. Monday will still go down as a Wall Street massacre, but that anonymous superhero buyer or buyers made it a lot less bloody. Who was the market’s superhero? I’m going to tell you a story and then you decide.”
“If they’re going to be so explicit in their hostility to the anonymity and liberty those means of exchange offer people, we should take them at their word. Let’s be clear in response that what they see as problems are the precise features we like about cash and cryptocurrencies. We support our well-worn folding money and bitcoin and its successors to come precisely because they put at least some of our activities beyond the reach of control freaks who want to monitor, tax, and regulate our lives.”
Read more: https://reason.com/archives/2018/02/06/governments-hate-bitcoin-and-cash-for-th
“Outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said U.S. stocks and commercial real estate prices are elevated but stopped short of saying those markets are in a bubble. ‘What we look at is, if stock prices or asset prices more generally were to fall, what would that mean for the economy as a whole?’ Yellen said. ‘And I think our overall judgment is that, if there were to be a decline in asset valuations, it would not damage unduly the core of our financial system.'”
“As global bond yields break ever higher, it appears The Bank of Japan is realizing it is losing control of its yield curve and today unleashed a double-whammy to stifle the bond bears… Whammy 1 – BoJ offers to buy unlimited 10Y notes at 11bps. Result – a 0.5bps drop in the JGB yield!!”
“Until Wells Fargo addresses shortcomings in areas including internal oversight, it can’t take any action that would boost total assets beyond their level at the end of 2017, without the Fed’s permission. The bank said after-tax profit in 2018 would be reduced by $300 million to $400 million and its stock slumped in late trading Friday.”
“JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. said they’re halting purchases of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on their credit cards. JPMorgan, enacting the ban Saturday, doesn’t want the credit risk associated with the transactions, company spokeswoman Mary Jane Rogers said. Capital One Financial Corp. and Discover Financial Services previously said they aren’t supporting the transactions. Mastercard Inc. said this week that cross-border volumes on its network — a measure of customer spending abroad — have risen 22 percent this year, fueled partly by clients using their cards to buy digital currencies.”
“The Treasury Department warned in its report to Congress that Russia’s sovereign debt market is too important to sanction without risking global financial turmoil, Bloomberg reported on Friday. That note can be seen as a sign of relief for Russian debt. The State Department did not hint as to whether the classified portion of its sanctions memo to Congress called for fines against those holding or trading in Russian securities.”
“China’s financial regulator has vowed to rescue the Chinese banking system immediately to avert a banking crisis when the bubble bursts, issuing a blanket guarantee that no major institution will be allowed to fail. Beijing says it has studied the errors that led to the Lehman crisis in the 2008 and will not allow a chain reaction to occur, even if this means paying a price in terms of lost economic growth and dynamism.”