Brutal slogging

Trade war trepidation turned to recessionary dread on Monday as U.S. stocks took a beating and Bitcoin tumbled to as low as $76,900. That low ebb came last night. On Tuesday, as of about 7:30 a.m. (EST), the largest crypto had crawled back up the greasy staircase down which it had fallen, easily reclaiming $80,000. When we checked BTC at 9:15 a.m. (EST), we found it consorting with $80,700.

Traders anxiously await tomorrow's inflation report. Longer term, dollar weakness would seem to bode well for liquidity, that is, in terms of easing overall debt-servicing costs around the world, although any effects of conceivably freed-up capital wouldn't be observable for at least a few months, said Jamie Coutts, an analyst at Real Vision.

At the same time, new, less hostile regulations impacting how traditional banks in the U.S. treat crypto going forward are said to be in the works, according to Decrypt.

Few coins are green today. No. 74 Movement (MOVE) did gain 12% in the past 24 hours, popping past the fifty-cent mark, as if some defiant daffodil pushing up through frost in an end-of-winter squall. MOVE surged 30% in the past week. Yesterday saw the launch of the Movement Public Mainnet Beta, touted as the first Move-based chain that enables, via Ethereum, permissionless deployment of smart contracts.

Meanwhile, U.S. stock futures were edging higher as of 8 a.m. (EST).

Those animal spirits were unleashed on Monday — except that in the U.S. they arrived in the form of a herd of angry hippos bent on capsizing every riverboat in sight. JP Morgan analysts, meanwhile, set loose the power of negative thinking, releasing a research note that hiked the odds of an American recession from 30% to 40%.

Faced with a low-growth, hard-landing scenario, the tech-heavy Nasdaq endured its worst day since September 2022. The Dow lost 900 points and closed below its 200-day moving average, which hasn't happened in 17 months.

Tesla (TSLA) tanked by 15% yesterday. Since Elon Musk became the government's hatchet man, Tesla's value has been chain-sawed in half, hemorrhaging some $800 billion worth of stock price value.

Shares of Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon fell 2%-4%, making for a "Not-So-Magnificent Seven."

Bank and consumer stocks saw declines, as did small-cap tech stocks.

In crypto, Ethereum sticks out for sheer abandonment. The No. 2 crypto has plunged 10% in the past 24 hours, slipping below $2,000. ETH has lost 21.8% in the past two weeks.

Incidentally, while we did not get through more than a few minutes of "The Brutalist" (and did not catch any of Adrien Brody's long-winded speech after winning the award for Best Actor) we did just now endeavor to check out which big coin has endured the most painful stretch of abuse since late February — and the winner of Most Brutalized Coin In A Leading Role goes to ... Dogecoin, down 22.4% since Feb. 25, and thus accounting for the worst fortnight of any Big Ten crypto.

Meanwhile, Official Trump (TRUMP), which hit an all-time high of $73 on Jan. 18, has since declined 86%. Solana-run TRUMP still has a market cap near $2B, making it the 54th-largest coin, per CoinGecko.

President Trump is about to sign an executive order aimed at reversing discriminatory crypto banking policies, said Decrypt.

The order is expected to roll back initiatives tied to “Operation Chokepoint 2.0,” a controversial Biden-era banking restriction that allegedly targeted crypto firms, essentially "de-banking" them, industry members have said.

This supposedly about-to-drop executive order may also include directives related to stablecoins.

Here is an area of the digital realm — classifying stablecoins, assigning them oversight parameters, establishing criteria for what constitutes acceptable forms of reserves — that has been receiving a bloat of attention on Capitol Hill.

In early February, Senator Bill Haggerty, a Republican from Tennessee, introduced a bill to create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, focusing on the two biggies, USDT and USDC, but also leaving flexibility for other smaller ones to flourish, provided that their deposits only ever get used for maintaining a dollar peg.

"Stablecoins power trillions of dollars' worth of transaction volume annually on blockchains," Axios said. "For U.S. policy makers, regulating them has been top of the agenda for years."

Sen. Haggerty's bill, as well as two other similar bills, aim to create ways and means for banks and other firms to launch stablecoins backed by greenbacks and/or safe, liquid instruments, such as short-term treasuries.