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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)

4/12/2021 4:29:16 PM

From: TobagoJack

Respond to of 217585

Re <<USA has abdicated>>

Let's see what happens Thursday and if anyone cares

bloomberg.com

Yellen Plans to Spare China From Currency Manipulator Label

Saleha Mohsin
13 April 2021, 03:52 GMT+8

Janet Yellen Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen will decline to name China as a currency manipulator in her first semiannual foreign-exchange report, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that allows the U.S. to sidestep a fresh clash with Beijing.

The report, which is not yet finalized, is due on Thursday, although it is unclear when the department will release it. During the Trump era, the Treasury Department was accused of politicizing the report after it abruptly designatedChina a manipulator in mid-2019 outside its usual release schedule, only to lift the label five months later to win concessions in a trade deal.

A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment.

Yellen’s team has also discussed the possibility of reversing a 2019 Trump administration move to lower thresholds for determining whether an economy is manipulating its currency for competitive advantage, the people said on condition of anonymity because the talks are private. A rollback could lead to the agency cutting the number of nations it scrutinizes by nearly half, they said.

The Biden administration is looking to hold China accountable for what it says are unfair trade practices, along with other issues such as human-rights violations, while reviewing what to do with tariffs slapped on billions of dollars of Chinese goods by former President Donald Trump.

Designation as a currency manipulator comes with no immediate penalties but can rattle financial markets. The law requires the administration to engage with the countries to address the perceived exchange-rate imbalance. Penalties, including exclusion from U.S. government contracts, could be applied after a year unless the label were removed.

U.S. Manipulation Criteria

A current-account surplus with the U.S. equivalent to 2% of GDPA bilateral trade surplus of at least $20 billionForeign-exchange interventions amounting to at least 2% of a country’s GDP

While China is set to escape a manipulation tag in the upcoming report, Treasury officials are concerned that the nation is masking currency intervention through activities at state-owned banks, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Related: Yellen Faces ‘Currency War’ Redux as Strong Dollar Ditched

During her confirmation hearing in January, Yellen told lawmakers that the U.S. “should oppose” attempts by other nations to game their currencies.

She also hinted at changing the criteria of the currency report, saying that bilateral trade deficits shouldn’t be seen as “a single catch-all metric.”

In the last report during the Trump administration, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin labeled Switzerland a currency manipulator and placed India on its watch list for closer scrutiny. Since then, officials in those nations have largely ignored the U.S. and are continuing aggressive moves, and indication that the report is no longer effective as it once was.

The Treasury’s currency report has had special resonance in Asia, home to eight of the 10 members of the December report’s monitoring list in addition to Vietnam’s manipulator tag. Governments in the region have been burdened by U.S.-China tensions throughout the trade war begun under the Trump administration, caught between a critical security and investment partner and their biggest economic partner.

They’re now bracing for the potential that President Joe Biden’s White House will keep up the pressure not just on China but on some of its traditional allies or friends in the region, including through assessments of domestic currency policies.

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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)	4/12/2021 7:22:32 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217585

Re <<USA has abdicated>> 'abdicated' might not be the appropriate verb. The people of USA voting on the crypto exchanges. arguable that Team USA invented the concept of the modern version of 'financial crime', for the express purpose of enslaving its tax serfs and punishing foreigners, all by right of USD being the global reserve currency. England, when running the reserve currency, did nothing remotely so over-reaching. China, by the on- and off-shore schema enabled for the eCNY programmable money, and by commerce-first DNA, shall likely run a schema where it be 1-planet / 2-systems / or more-systems per CCP pragmatism that essentially says 'whatever works goes' It is possible that the Vietnam War of financial actions criminalisation is coming to an inexorably end to a point of inevitability, and should it be so, freedom shall reign, per global one-dollar-one-vote voting by capital flight Casper shall prove helpful, unless supplemented w/ a better system, to secure planetary fairness and universal freedom Had to listen to the presentation 5-6-7 lost count times to take it all in shall fill in the blanks by easy-listening of below thinking about taking the course, depending on trading opening day 7th May pricing action Revolution enables change, and best we understand the insurrectionists as we have money on the front lines one or another way. The system can fight back by tee-ing up even more horrific forms of capital control. No bystanders, all are either in the fight, on one or the other sides, or prospective collateral damage road pizza economist.com The war against money-laundering is being lost The global system for financial crime is hugely expensive and largely ineffective Apr 12th 2021 The global system for financial crime is hugely expensive and largely ineffective YET ANOTHER bank is preparing to face the music over alleged failings in its efforts to curb flows of dirty money. In the coming weeks NatWest, one of Britain’s largest lenders, is set to appear in court in London to respond to charges that it failed to properly scrutinise a gold-dealing client that deposited £365m ($502m) with the bank—£264m of it in cash. NatWest (which has said it is co-operating with the investigation) is the latest in a long line of banks to be accused of falling short in the fight against dirty money. Last year global lenders were hit with $10.4bn in penalties for money-laundering violations, an increase of more than 80% on 2019, according to Fenergo, a compliance-software firm. In January Capital One, an American bank, was fined $390m for failing to report thousands of suspicious transactions. Danske Bank is still dealing with the fallout of a scandal that erupted in 2018. Over $200bn of potentially dirty money was washed through the Danish lender’s small Estonian branch while executives missed or ignored a sea of red flags. These cases suggest that banks remain the Achilles heel in the global war on money-laundering, despite the reams of regulations aimed at turning them into frontline soldiers in that conflict. However, closer examination suggests that the global anti-money-laundering (AML) system has serious structural flaws, largely because governments have outsourced to the private sector much of the policing they should have been doing themselves. A study published last year by Ronald Pol, a financial-crime expert, concluded that the global AML system could be “the world’s least effective policy experiment”, and that compliance costs for banks and other businesses could be more than 100 times higher than the amount of laundered loot seized. Red-tape revolution Money-laundering was not even a crime across much of the world until the 1980s. Since then countries from Afghanistan to Zambia have been arm-twisted, particularly by America, into passing laws. This effort intensified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the passage of America’s Patriot Act, which targeted the money trails of those financing terrorists and other criminals. This has turned AML compliance into a huge part of what banks do and created large new bureaucracies. It is not unusual for firms such as HSBC or JPMorgan Chase to have 3,000-5,000 specialists focused on fighting financial crime, and more than 20,000 overall in risk and compliance. The AML push has succeeded in stamping out the most pernicious practices, such as using shell banks (those with no real customers) in sunny places to launder suitcases stuffed with drug money. But criminals haven’t been forced to get particularly creative: it is not much more difficult today than it was 20 years ago to rinse dirty money by setting up a shell company, disguising the loot flowing through it as legitimate revenue and persuading an established bank to process it. As a result, the numbers tell of a war being lost. The “Global Threat Assessment”, a report by John Cusack, an ex-chair of the Wolfsberg Group, an association of banks that helps develop AML standards, estimates that $5.8trn-worth of financial crime was perpetrated in 2018—equivalent to 6.7% of global GDP. Statistics on how much is intercepted by authorities are patchy. A decade-old estimate by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime put it at just 0.2% of the total. In 2016 Europol estimated the confiscation rate in Europe to be a higher but still paltry 1.1%. Some experts think the success rate may have fallen in recent years, in part because of the rise of “trade-based money-laundering”—which moves dodgy money into the legitimate economy by playing tricks with paperwork for cross-border trade. The covid-19 pandemic, too, has boosted opportunities for financial ne’er-do-wells. Criminals have set up shell companies to exploit vast, poorly policed government-aid schemes. In Britain, the authorities have received more than 50,000 reports of potential misuse of its “Bounce Back Loans” and furlough schemes. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental body that sets global AML standards, admits to problems with the system. Last October its president, Marcus Pleyer, sounded an exasperated note, accusing the “vast majority” of countries of failing to tackle money-laundering. Some countries have been able to achieve solid marks in the organisation’s assessments by passing nice-looking AML laws, only to water them down later, or fail to implement key provisions. One offender is the United Arab Emirates, where weak enforcement has helped Dubai become a haven for corrupt capital. But America and Britain also look to game the FATF process, albeit less egregiously. Global efforts to stamp out money-laundering have, if anything, waned over the past five years, says Robert Barrington, a professor of anti-corruption practice at the University of Sussex. In 2016 David Cameron, Britain’s then prime minister, hosted a global anti-corruption summit, and other governments queued up to back the cause. But it proved a false dawn. Britain became distracted by Brexit. In America, President Donald Trump showed scant leadership on the issue. Russia and China have stymied efforts to co-ordinate global anti-corruption efforts. Three big problems hobble the fight against financial crime: a lack of transparency; a lack of collaboration; and a lack of resources. Start with transparency. Investigators can struggle to identify the real, “beneficial”, owners of shell companies, who often hide behind legal nominees. Some progress has been made in increasing visibility. Britain launched a public register of company owners in 2016, spurring several others to follow suit. Britain’s offshore satellites, such as the British Virgin Islands and Jersey, have been arm-twisted into setting up registers or strengthening existing ones. Late last year American lawmakers passed a law requiring ownership data on firms registered at state level, including in Delaware’s incorporation factories, to be held in a federal register. However, many countries still eschew registers, and those that have them have encountered problems. In Britain, for instance, criminals have been willing to risk filing false information, or none at all, given the modest penalties for doing so. Hong Kong, meanwhile, plans to scale back the details company owners must disclose on its register. The FATF is reviewing its standard on beneficial-ownership transparency with a view to making it tougher; the current version says merely that “competent authorities” should have access to such information “in a timely fashion”. But getting its 39 core members—from America and the EU to China and Russia—to agree on a new text will be difficult. The second problem, lack of collaboration, hobbles governments’ work with each other, and with banks on the front line. The big money-laundering schemes are sophisticated and transnational, while anti-laundering efforts remain balkanised. Information-sharing between governments is improving, thanks to co-operation among “financial-intelligence units”, national centres that collect data on suspicious transactions. But the “mutual legal assistance” system, which countries investigating crimes use to request information from each other, is clunky. As for data flowing to and from banks, the benefits of sharing are indisputable. “The value of information coming from a network of banks is thousands of times higher than the information any one bank has, because you can see not just where the money came from, but where it went, and where it went from there, and so on. It gives you a picture of the network,” says the head of a large international bank. Unfortunately, the level of collaboration is “terrible”. America does best, thanks to the Patriot Act, but even there information-sharing is “on a tiny scale”, with anything more requiring a warrant from a judge, “which is hard if you don’t know what the crime is yet”. Britain is in second place, he says, with “about 30%” of the data-sharing done in America. And in third place? “No one.” A daunting obstacle to sharing information is data-privacy laws, which in many countries prevent banks from passing information to authorities, particularly those in other countries. Some big banks have lobbied for exceptions to be made for AML, but “governments don’t see it as a legislative priority”, says an executive at another bank. The third difficulty, a dearth of resources, stems from the fact that white-collar crime is less visible than violent crime. Spending on curbing the latter goes down better with the public. In Britain, fraud makes up more than a third of reported crime, yet gets less than 1% of police resources in terms of officers. Banks can spend all they like on AML, but the criminals won’t end up in court if governments fail to invest in policing and prosecution. Many crime-fighting agencies lack the funding to properly analyse the torrent of so-called “suspicious-activity reports” banks file when they spot potentially dodgy transactions. SARs are a cornerstone of the current system. But banks file too many low-quality or unnecessary reports because the system incentivises them to cover their backs rather than apply sensible risk criteria. Globally they file millions of SARs a year; in Britain alone regulators received over 573,000 in the 2019-20 financial year. All this suggests that governments need to work harder collectively to make the AML system fit for purpose. “Blaming banks for not ‘properly’ implementing anti-money-laundering laws is a convenient fiction,” Mr Pol’s report concluded. It also gives an unfair pass to the non-bank actors that enable corruption. While fines for banks with poor AML controls have risen relentlessly, lawyers who set up dodgy shell companies, accountants who sign off on their fishy filings and the like have been getting away with slaps on the wrist. Britain’s revenues and customs agency, for instance, supervises more than 30,000 accountants, estate agents and other businesses for money-laundering purposes; in the 2019-20 financial year it issued just 31 fines, averaging £290,000. Governments also need to get to grips with the AML implications of cryptocurrencies, and the firms and exchanges that hawk them. A recent report by the Bank for International Settlements warned of “a critical need for swift and global implementation of international standards”. Activists who campaign to fix the cracks in the global AML architecture are pinning much hope on the Biden administration, which has said that it views the fight against corruption as a national-security issue and therefore a priority. Whether it can work more profitably than its predecessor with Europe, which is overhauling AML oversight in the wake of the Danske debacle, remains to be seen. Hopes that China can be persuaded to co-operate are not high. Either way, bankers should probably brace themselves for another beating.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)	4/13/2021 9:13:05 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217585

Bullish, that race is now weaponised in the war between fiats and bitcoin, and gold is not even in arena, potentially allow those engaging with better bitgold to exchange for more truegold when it is optimum time to do so bloomberg.com Black Americans Are Embracing Stocks and Bitcoin to Make Up for Stolen Time Investing influencers who are attracting audiences on the Clubhouse app say bold steps need to be taken to close the wealth gap. Akayla Gardner April 13, 2021, 7:00 PM GMT+8 Tani Chambers founded Black Women Who Invest on Clubhouse, attracting over 21,000 followers. Photographer: Amir Hamja/BloombergThey’ve heard it all before. Set a budget. Avoid high-interest debt. And, oh yes, it sure is smart to get that 401(k) match from your employer. But for a new generation of Black financial enthusiasts, that’s just not going to cut it. Wealth For You Help us deliver more relevant content for you by telling us about yourself. Answer 3 questions to tailor your experience. In the real world and increasingly online, they are pushing their followers to take bolder steps to create wealth. This includes investing in stocks and even cryptocurrencies. Part of their argument is that Black Americans need to make big moves to make up for stolen time. For over a century after emancipation, institutional policies ranging from Jim Crow segregation to modern-day redlining have disenfranchised Black people from building generational wealth. Today, Black Americans hold just 3.8% of $116 trillion in wealth in the U.S., according to data from the Federal Reserve. “There is a deep well, a deep sense of longing for opportunities and looking for ways to be successful built into African American history and experience,” says Shennette Garrett-Scott, an associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Mississippi. The advocates’ message is not falling on deaf ears. Data show that while fewer Black Americans invest in stocks than White people, they are actually more receptive to holding cryptocurrencies. A recent Harris Poll survey found that in the U.S., 30% of Black and 27% Hispanic investors own cryptocurrency, compared with just 17% of White investors. The same survey found that over half of Black and Hispanic Americans who had heard of cryptocurrencies believe their decentralized nature is a positive aspect, compared with 44% of all Americans. Garrett-Scott says a majority of Black Americans do not have access to people within their networks with entrepreneurial knowledge. Instead, many turn to the internet and social media. Evidence of this is prominent in the Clubhouse app. In the audio-only social-media network — it’s like a cross between a podcast and a call-in radio network — many “clubs” with names such as Black Women Who Invest, Black Wealth Matters and Black Bitcoin Billionaires have sprung up. And in just a few months, they have attracted tens of thousands of followers. Tani Chambers Photographer: Amir Hamja/Bloomberg Tani Chambers, 44, runs Black Women Who Invest. Founded in December, it now has over 21,000 followers. The group meets every Saturday for a session called “Investing 101” and every Sunday for a book club. The focus: long-term investment in areas such as retirement accounts, real estate and index funds. Chambers is motivated in part by her belief that Black Americans need to invest more. In her 20s, for instance, she remembers her mother only telling her she needed to save some of the paychecks from her Madison Avenue job. It wasn’t until five years ago that the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant and a Black American decided she need to do more than save. “That’s not enough, especially for Black women,” said Chambers, who would go on to found a fintech startup and social-media presence pushing Black women to embrace investing. Ross Mac, 31, a former Wall Street sales analyst from Chicago founded Black Wealth Matters, also on Clubhouse. The group now has more than 68,000 followers, many of who tune in every Wednesday to chat about a catch-all of personal finance topics, ranging from budgeting to investing. “This is the new civil rights movement,” he says. Mac, who started making financial literacy videos on Instagram and YouTube in 2019, also hosts a weekly segment called “Maconomics” on cable music network Revolt TV. Ross Mac Photographer: Taylor Glascock/Bloomberg Clubhouse is still an invite-only app frequented by billionaires and backed by Silicon Valley insiders. The company says it was founded to “build a social experience that felt more human.” Key to that goal is allowing listeners to chime in and ask questions, often speaking to experts they might not otherwise have had the chance to connect with. The democratized nature of Clubhouse explains some of the appeal to Black listeners. When Chambers joined Clubhouse in October, the demographics in many of her rooms-of-choice reflected the White, male-dominated venture capital industry. “I found out it wasn’t the safest space for Black women to speak or be heard on financial topics,” she said. Chambers’ club is an offshoot of a syndicate she started for Black women investors. “We have to take some high risks and make the investments that maybe are a little bit more risky than conservative because we are playing catch-up,” she says. However — while Clubhouse users can report accounts if they exhibit suspicious behavior and those accounts can potentially be suspended — risks abound for those who aren’t careful about who and what they are listening to. As people increasingly turn to social media platforms as a source of tips for managing their money, and an ever-expanding pool of users offer such content, it’s becoming harder to separate reasonable lessons from ideas that are misinformed and potentially catastrophic for personal finances. Investing in assets such as equities and Bitcoin can be risky, and several studies have shown that stock picking fails to beat the broader market over the long run, even when done by finance-industry professionals. Earlier this year, New York’s top law enforcement officer warned consumers about the susceptibility of the cryptocurrency market to “speculative bubbles”and abuse by criminals. The Black Wealth Matters group has more than 68,000 followers on Clubhouse. Photographer: Taylor Glascock/Bloomberg Mac says he hears misinformation on Clubhouse every day. Black Wealth Matters issues a disclaimer on its homepage and the hosts often repeat it audibly, notifying listeners that their advice is for informational use only. One of Chambers’ club’s mottos is “no hype, just facts,” she said. Black Women Who Invest also issues a disclaimer on its homepage. Outside of clubs like Chamber’s and Mac’s, Clubhouse also hosts conversations by an expanding number of Black cryptocurrency evangelists with tens of thousands of followers. Black Bitcoin Billionaires is the largest cryptocurrency group on the app with about 51,800 followers. The group has a partnership with Square Inc., where the company sponsors Bitcoin giveaways for members through its Cash App. Lamar Wilson, co-founder of Black Bitcoin Billionaires, said when he first read a public technical guide to Bitcoin, the currency to him symbolized freedom from an oppressive financial system. Lamar Wilson Photographer: Scotty Perry/Bloomberg “All it did was represent the opposite of what goes on in this county,” Wilson, 41, said. “They say we’re a capitalist society, yet they always bail out the biggest ones of us and don’t allow the little guy to compete.” Niles Stewart, 23, started investing in Bitcoin — despite disapproval from his father — while studying at DePauw University. The founder of Black Crypto Talks says he now has more assets in cryptocurrency than in cash. “African Americans have had to rely on self-help and self-determination because the institutions are not serving them,” Garrett-Scott of the University of Mississippi said. “At the same time, it’s like a double-edged sword. It cuts both ways. There’s opportunity and risk in the same moment.” In an ideal world, Garrett-Scott said Black Americans would be able to take advantage of existing opportunities to build wealth instead of working around barriers. “It is my hope that people will continue to keep this spark of Black entrepreneurship and Black capitalism alive in these new digital spaces because these are spaces that weren’t created for us,” Garrett-Scott said. — With assistance by Charlie Wells Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE Sent from my iPad

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)	4/17/2021 9:36:54 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217585

Re <<USD>> currently crashing fast against Casper Message 33278804 due I am guessing to dilution as opposed to given inflation Casper might be a bigger joke than Dogecoin in price terms, but not nearly yet in market cap logic (1500X of CSPR) Current, as in right now, CSPR is indicated as spot coinmarketcap.com 4.92 and future at 0.37, with neither deliverable yet. Let us see what 7th May brings what on which exchange as the future and spot should merge, by theory I am sitting on some unrealised and might not be realisable gains Message 33280590 :0) I like 4.92 better than 0.37, because I like a doubling of an effective-doubling of NAV to a mere 7% rise. neironix.io coinmarketcap.com bloomberg.com Dogecoin Frenzy Overloads Robinhood Crypto Order System Joanna Ossinger and Vildana Hajric 16 April 2021, 23:10 GMT+8 Coinbase’s listing offered momentum to the whole asset class Binance Coin, Dogecoin surge amid broad digital-money interest The frenzy around digital tokens is taking its zaniest turn yet in the price of a token created as a joke, buckling the crypto trading system at Robinhood Markets. Dogecoin, boosted by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, rallied more than 110% Friday before dropping by 26% on Saturday, according to CoinMarketCap.com. It now has a market value of more than $36 billion and is still up 13,400% from a year ago, when it traded for $0.002 and was worth about $250 million. Demand was so brisk for the token that investors trying to trade it on Robinhood crashed the site, the online exchange said in a blog post Friday. Some $68 billion worth of Dogecoin changed hands in the prior 24 hours as of 4:45 p.m. Friday in New York, the most since June, CoinMarketCap.com data showed. Doge’s surge is part of a rise in altcoins, a term for all the digital tokens that have sprung up in imitation of Bitcoin. Like most of them, its use case is limited, making it a tool for speculators and raising concern that a bubble is inflating in a crypto world now worth more than $2.25 trillion. “This reminds me of the dot com days. We knew something big was going on, a lot of investors were chasing it hard. That led to a bubble,” Scott Knapp, chief market strategist at CUNA Mutual Group, said. “For every Amazon.com there were 10 pets.com that went bankrupt. Is Dogecoin the pets.com of the cryptocurrency era?” Interest in crypto is on the rise again after companies from PayPal to Square started enabling transactions in Bitcoin on their systems, and Wall Street firms like Morgan Stanley began providing access to the tokens to some of the wealthiest clients. All along, crypto die-hards who say the blockchain technology will rewire the financial community have been plugging crypto, getting rich in the process. The Shiba-Inu themed Dogecoin was created as a joke by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2013. Musk sparked a rally in it earlier this year when he posted a photo of a faux magazine “Dogue” featuring a dog in a red sweater. But Michael Novogratz, chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital Holdings, isn’t buying the hype, since Dogecoin “doesn’t really have a purpose.” “It’s reminiscent of GameStop,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV, referring to the meme stock mania that gripped markets in February. “I would be very, very worried if one of my friends was investing in Dogecoin at these prices.” With little to back up the case for buying cryptocurrencies, the likelihood of them cratering remains high, leaving novice traders who jumped in on the hype vulnerable to steep losses. “The government has pumped so much monetary and fiscal stimulus into the economy now, even worthless assets are being bid up,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading. Yet alt-coin popularity is hard to ignore. While Bitcoin is worth more than $1 trillion, the total market cap of the token universe now exceeds $2.25 trillion, according to CoinGecko.com, which tracks more than 6,700 coins. Bitcoin’s dominance in the crypto world has declined 28% since the beginning of the year, according to OKEX Insights Analyst Robbie Liu, citing data from Tradingview. The waning influence started to accelerate this month, he said in an email Friday, and Bitcoin now accounts for less than 54% of the crypto market capitalization -- the lowest level in nearly two years. Your guide to a life well spentSign up for the Wealth weekly newsletter. “On the altcoins front, we continue to see strong momentum,” said Pankaj Balani, the CEO of Delta Exchange, a leading crypto derivatives exchange, in a note Thursday. He noted Ether’s recent record and increased activity in decentralized finance or DeFi, adding that “decentralized exchange coins will be in focus in the next few days, given that the market has validated Coinbase at a $100 billion valuation.” Other tokens with shaky to no fundamentals are also rising. Cardano and Polkadot, both in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, have surged this week. “Polkadot and Cardano have very few ‘users’” currently, said Shashwat Gupta, founder of Altcoinbuzz.io, in an email Wednesday, though he added that there’s a substantial amount of development being built on them. And it looks like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong may have been on to something when he said after the listing that it marks a “ shift in legitimacy” for crypto. The Coinbase listing “ultimately will deliver more ‘use cases’ for cryptos and should keep the crypto market growing,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst for North America at Oanda Corp. — With assistance by Claire Ballentine, Olga Kharif, Sonali Basak, and Yueqi Yang (Updates with Dogecoin’s price decline on Saturday. A prior version of this story was corrected to show Dogecoin was created in 2013.) Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)	4/18/2021 3:21:45 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217585

Mike Green is a no-coin-er deep-state muppet mouth-piece and I love listening to his rage against the anti-fragile, sovereign, magnificent, metaverse money we know as bitgold He reckons, as I believe he might be correct, that 2021 be the year the authorities try to do hit job on bitgold. The moves shall fail, and BTC rise from the resultant ash of fiat paper.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)	4/18/2021 4:40:34 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217585

Very exciting stuff happening Bitcoin falling against the Dollar, and Dollar falling against Casper coinmarketcap.com bloomberg.com Bitcoin Plunges in Biggest Intraday Drop Since February Shamim Adam 18 April 2021, 15:18 GMT+8 Bitcoin plunged the most in more than seven weeks, just days after reaching a record. The biggest crypto coin fell 8.5% to $55,810.32 as of 2:52 p.m. in Singapore on Sunday, after declining as much as 15.1% to $51,707.51. Ether, the second-largest token, dropped almost 18% before paring losses. Several online reports attributed the plunge to speculation the U.S. Treasury may crack down on money laundering that’s carried out through digital assets. Bitcoin hit a record high of $64,869.78 last week ahead of the debut trade for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. on the Nasdaq Wednesday. The original crypto coin, Bitcoin is valued at more than $1 trillion after a more than 800% surge in the past year. Bitcoin Approaches $65,000 With Coinbase Listing Fueling Demand Growing mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies has spurred Bitcoin’s rally, as well as lifted other tokens to record highs. Interest in crypto went on the rise again after companies from PayPal to Square started enabling transactions in Bitcoin on their systems, and Wall Street firms like Morgan Stanley began providing access to the tokens to some of the wealthiest clients. That’s despite lingering concerns over their volatility and usefulness as a method of payment. Dogecoin, a token created as a joke and which has been boosted by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, rallied more than 110% Friday before dropping the next day. Demand was so brisk for the token that investors trying to trade it on Robinhood crashed the site, the online exchange said in a blog post Friday. Governments are inspecting risks around the sector more closely as the investor base widens. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell last week said Bitcoin “is a little bit like gold” in that it’s more a vehicle for speculation than making payments. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde in January took aim at Bitcoin’s role in facilitating criminal activity, saying the cryptocurrency has been enabling “funny business.” Turkey’s central bank banned the use of cryptocurrencies as a form of payment from April 30, saying the level of anonymity behind the digital tokens brings the risk of “non-recoverable” losses. India will propose a law that bans cryptocurrencies and fines anyone trading or holding such assets, Reuters reported in March, citing an unidentified senior government official with direct knowledge of the plan. Crypto firms are beefing up their top ranks to shape the emerging regulatory environment and tackle lingering skepticism about digital tokens. Bitcoin’s most ardent proponents see it as a modern-day store of value and inflation hedge, while others fear a speculative bubble is building. (Updates with regulators’ concerns from seventh paragraph) Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (170412)	4/18/2021 9:05:30 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By marcher Respond to of 217585

If I mark to market right now I am 48% allocated to crypto (BTC, BTCC, GBTC, COIN, and Casper) Ray counsels 20%, so am overweight. Of course Casper is just the life-blood cells of an App. It boggles my mind that MSFT missed crypto; like what were its geniuses doing at work? improving Word program so that it might do some of WordPerfect's tasks neater? Utility tokens, whilst can be used as money, is just a manifestation of utility software that happens to be fungible. If Word and Microsoft's Office suite of programs can be traded like packs of cigarettes in jail, the software can also be 'alt-money'. Of course, generally software are unlimited in quantity and therefore constrained in price. In the meantime the narrative changing ... next they are going to tell us that masks and vaccination would guard against criminal use of cash. “That’s in fact why criminal use of Bitcoin has gone down. It’s been estimated recently that [in] criminal cases around the world, 1% or 1.5% use Bitcoin, and that number in the last 5-9 months has gone down to under 1%. Because actually, using Bitcoin for crime is a terrible idea because you can go to the publicly accessible blockchain. It’s completely transparent and they track down the criminals, so the criminals are not using Bitcoin. They’re using cash, or they might be using gold. It’s much more fungible.” dailyhodl.com Longtime Bitcoin Skeptic Ray Dalio Recommends Allocating 20% of Portfolio to BTC: Report Longtime Bitcoin bull Max Keiser says that gold has one single advantage over the world’s leading crypto asset by market cap. In a new interview with Daniela Cambone of Stansberry Research, the Wall Street veteran concedes that, despite being a vocal Bitcoin advocate, gold is superior to Bitcoin in that it is a malleable good that retains its properties while also shapeshifting and providing anonymity to its holder. “The one attribute that gold has that Bitcoin doesn’t at the moment is fungibility. Gold is fungible to an extent that Bitcoin is not. Fungibility meaning you can melt down your gold and recast it in some other different form and it maintains its integrity as gold and it’s completely anonymous. It’s completely fungible. Bitcoin, because it is digital, because it is a public blockchain, because it’s transparent, you don’t have the same fungibility.” By traditional economics definitions, Bitcoin is not 100% fungible because of how the blockchain allows you to see the history of each coin, unlike gold, which can take an entirely new form after being melted down. According to Keiser, the lack of confidentiality on the Bitcoin blockchain is likely the reason why criminal activity using BTC has drastically decreased, with most criminals preferring cash or other assets. “That’s in fact why criminal use of Bitcoin has gone down. It’s been estimated recently that [in] criminal cases around the world, 1% or 1.5% use Bitcoin, and that number in the last 5-9 months has gone down to under 1%. Because actually, using Bitcoin for crime is a terrible idea because you can go to the publicly accessible blockchain. It’s completely transparent and they track down the criminals, so the criminals are not using Bitcoin. They’re using cash, or they might be using gold. It’s much more fungible.” Ex-Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Morell recently published a letter suggesting that criminal activity is in fact flowing away from the Bitcoin blockchain and into Anonymity-Enhanced Cryptocurrencies such as Monero (XMR). “Based on our research, I have come to believe that if there was one financial ecosystem for bad actors to use that would maximize law enforcement’s chances of identifying them and their illicit activities, it would be blockchain.” Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any loses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing. Featured Image: Shutterstock/Yevhen Tarnavskyi/Angelatriks