[T]he price of Bitcoin fell below $70,000 for the first time since November 2024, reversing the gains the cryptocurrency had made since Donald Trump’s re-election. Bitcoin has been declining since hitting a peak of $126,000 in October 2025. Investors have dumped the token despite deregulation and the establishment of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in America, which have so far failed to transform the industry.
Fear of liquidity drying up, so gold and silver prices collapsed?
The incoming Fed head,
Walsh is against the Fed carrying a bloated balance sheet and wants the central bank to reduce its financial market footprint. As recently as October, Warsh told Fox Business that the Fed should “free up the balance sheet, take money out of Wall Street.”
Reuters
So if there’s less liquidity? A reason for
Prices fell further on Monday. Gold slid 5% to its lowest in more than two weeks, while silver fell more than 7%. Update: Gold was up 3% in the Asia morning to US$4,800 an ounce, a bounce of nearly 9% from Monday lows. Silver traded 5% higher to US$83.34 an ounce.
But can Warsch really reduce Fed;s balance sheet?
Kevin Warsh, tapped to become the next Federal Reserve chair, may want to significantly contract the central bank’s multi-trillion-dollar balance sheet, but experts agree that financial realities strongly indicate accomplishing this goal will be difficult and slow, if it can be done at all.
That’s because Fed holdings and the regime that’s grown to manage interest rates in a system that is flush with cash is not easy to wind back while maintaining market stability and achieving monetary policy goals. It could be even trickier for a Fed chair who is likely to seek easier short-term borrowing costs, because anything that notably contracts central bank bond holdings actually tightens financial conditions.
Investors flocked to exchange-traded funds of gold, other precious metals and gold miners in January, seeking safety amid geopolitical uncertainty, expectations of further dollar weakness, and growing bets on U.S. interest rate cuts.
Investors responded to Big Tech earnings this week with a stark warning: they will forgive record spending that brings solid growth, but punish companies if not, showing how much the stakes have changed since ChatGPT’s launch more than three years ago.
We know that BoA, JPMorgan and Capital have declined Morgan or closed his account since the Capitol riots. He has sued the last two and didn’t invite the CEO of BoA to a Davos party
Or Why the EU is a bunch of surrender monkees that deserve to be humiliated and bullied.
Less than four years ago, Europe’s economy was dealt a harsh blow in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as nations had to rapidly find alternatives to the abundant Russian natural gas they had relied on for decades. That scramble triggered a severe supply shock and a four-fold increase in European gas prices in the first six months of the conflict.
Europe resolved this problem by trading one dependency for another. As Russia’s share of European Union gas imports fell to 12% last year, from 45% before the invasion, Europe rapidly turned to U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG). Imports of U.S. LNG skyrocketed from 18 million metric tons in 2021 to 65 million tons last year, making up 57% of all LNG imported by the EU and Britain in 2025, according to analytics firm Kpler. Today, the U.S. supplies nearly a quarter of the EU’s total gas imports.
In the US, aluminum is a metal used across a wide array of industries from automotive and aerospace to construction and packaging …
American aluminium buyers are now paying an eye-watering 68% premium over the London Metal Exchange (LME) price to get physical metal.
This is of course a direct of result of U.S. President Donald Trump hiking import tariffs from 10% to 25% in March and again to 50% in June.
But the premium for physical delivery in the U.S. Midwest is trading another $560 per metric ton over any implied tariff cost, propelling the “all-in” price of aluminium above $5,000 per ton.
Rising Treasury yields cause a whole different set of issues – further complicating the funding of mounting U.S. debt piles and torching Trump’s big housing “affordability” push ahead of November’s mid-term congressional elections.
The prospect of rising mortgage rates on the back of higher Treasury yields cuts across much of the president’s new-year economic agenda. After Tuesday’s jump, for example, 30-year U.S. Treasury yields are 10 basis points above where they were at Trump’s inauguration last year – despite three Fed rate cuts in the interim.
That comes as U.S. opinion polls show voters think Trump is spending too much time on world affairs and not enough on fixing the economy, let alone risking another import price rise with new tariffs.
“Toying with more tariffs won’t help,” wrote AXA Group chief economist Gilles Moec, adding that the eight European states targeted account for 25% of U.S. imports and a 10% tariff rise would lift the average U.S. tariff rate by 2.5 percentage points.
When I was in Primary school in the early 60s, I learnt that tin was an important metal. It was also an important export of the Malayan Peninsula, along with rubber.
In the mid 1980s, I became an equities broker specializing in M’sia. At that time, tin was irrelevant both as a metal and as an export.
A few years ago no one paid much attention to tin. The market was too small, both in terms of physical volumes and futures activity, to qualify for investment with most fund managers.
That is changing as the world wakes up to tin’s central role in the coming Internet of Things Age. No circuit boards, no internet. And very little else in our hyper-connected world.
It is telling that the head of the world’s most important chipmaker had to talk to his “customers’ customers” to make sure demand for artificial intelligence is, in fact, real. But the $1.4 trillion Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s (2330.TW) , opens new tab chief executive has done just that to justify a huge increase in capital expenditure for the current year. It’s just the type of validation AI bulls have been waiting for.
UBS is fighting the Swiss govt over threat of more stringent capital buffers.
See how big UBS Americas is v UBS Switzerland.
Earlier this year, UBS denied that it wanted to give up its Swiss passport. The Swiss government had many regulatory disagreements with it. They forced a shotgun marriage with Credit Suisse a few years ago, which made it too big to fail. But too big for the Swiss state to rescue it.
And members are all American. And three of them led by people born outside the US. And the US-burn CEO is gay. E Pluribus Unum, Latin for “Out of many, one,” is the motto of the United States,
Btw, Indians rule OK. And being White and straight sucks. LOL.
Thoughts of a Cynical Investor 