Friday, Apr 14, 2023
” – Yogi Berra CRYPTO MARKET PRICING: Join myself and a team of experts from data and analytics provider Coin Metrics in a free webinar to discuss crypto markets, pricing challenges, valuation factors, why regulators are paying attention, and much more, on Thursday, April 20 at 10:30am ET.
Per-article narration is paused while we focus on the 9 daily compilation episodes. Listen to today's Finance daily brief — the story below is covered there alongside the rest of the day's reads. The full article text is below — read along while we ramp narration back up.
“The future ain't what it used to be.” – Yogi Berra** **
CRYPTO MARKET PRICING: Join myself and a team of experts from data and analytics provider Coin Metrics in a free webinar to discuss crypto markets, pricing challenges, valuation factors, why regulators are paying attention, and much more, on Thursday, April 20 at 10:30am ET. Sign up here!
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WHAT I’M WATCHING
PPI signals. On the surface, the below-expectations readings are really good news, but were largely due to energy prices whose help on inflation is likely to be fleeting. More on this below.
ECB expectations and the dollar. The outlook for the dollar is a key factor in the outlook for crypto prices. More on this below.
ETH withdrawals. So, more than a day after the Shapella upgrade, we can breathe a sigh of relief and say that wasn’t so bad – as in, no wall of selling. More on this below.
Global CBDCs? On Wednesday, Bo Li – the IMF’s Deputy Managing Director – said in a speech at the annual Spring Meeting that 40 countries have approached the institution for help with designing CBDCs, and that it is already working with 30. This is sobering, as linking the IMF to international currencies implies a certain amount of mission creep, as well as potentially conflicting incentives when it comes to economic independence vs economic harmonization. I don’t have more to say about this at the moment, but this is worth keeping an eye on, and I will be brooding about it.
MARKETS
Slippery oil signals
Yesterday delivered good news on the likely direction of goods prices, with an unexpected month-on-month decline in the US PPI index – it came in with a drop of -0.5% vs 0.0% in February, the steepest drop since the start of the pandemic, while the consensus forecast was for a *bump *to 0.1%.