No words can describe the sadness. When a man decides to take his own life in order to kill children at a pop concert, the entire world mourns. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families. Some reports went as far as to say that the British Pound is falling on this tragedy. Though I don’t think there is any direct correlation it’s a comforting thought that perhaps financial markets can feel pain or even cry.
Today the White House will unveil their new budget plan, which they’ve proactively named “A New Foundation for American Greatness.” As expected, the plan calls for increased military spending and decreased funding for the poor and the sick. Though the Republicans have a strong majority in congress, they are unlikely to wave this budget directly through.
Perhaps it will work in the administration’s favor that Trump himself is off overseas trying to bring peace to the Middle East. This way, his administration and congress can hash things out as quickly as possible, without distraction, so that everybody can get on to something that everybody feels passionate about, cutting taxes for the rich.
The financial markets have gone flat again. As Air Force One left Washington DC the VIX volatility index dropped notably. Yesterday Wall Street was able to claw back a bit of the losses from last week’s Trump Dump but many analysts are skeptical of these low volume gains. For now, there is just a touch of safe haven trading.
Gold once again finds itself near the top of its range and finding some resistance at $1264 per ounce. Should further geopolitical uncertainty continue, it could carry it past the yellow line and $1300 may be around the corner.
The USDJPY is inching towards support at 110.25 (yellow line). If investors continue with the safe haven appetite it could push as low as 108 (blue line) below which there is no support for quite some distance.
RIP Ripple
In an article published on Huffington Post, of all places, senior officers of the company that created Ripple attempted to fight back against accusations and defend what they see as the future of banking.
They did make a few fair points about how the old system is too slow and expensive. However, they did not make a convincing case to explain why they felt justified in owning outright more than half of the global supply of XRP (Ripple) tokens.
By the end of the piece, they had even stooped so low as to start bashing bitcoin. They called her slow and unscalable. Of course, I’m sure they know by now that a solution for the bitcoin scalability issue could be just around the corner.
In fact, in a New York conference yesterday, Bitcoin Miners agreed that a solution for quick and easy verification of Bitcoin transactions could be implemented as soon as September.
Not only that, a new startup called RSK Labs is now developing a project to bring Ethereum-like smart contracts to the bitcoin network.
The total market cap of the bitcoin blockchain reached a new high yesterday of $37 Billion. Still, a very small number if you think about the growth that is likely to come from Japan in the coming months.
However, this is probably the riskiest market since the dawn of time. Even just last night we saw a huge drop of more than $100 in less than 10 minutes. So please proceed with caution.
Let’s have a safe and successful day ahead!
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