Tuesday, Nov 21, 2023

the regulators are at it again, the market reaction, recession clouds

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.” – Lao Tzu ||

Hello everyone! I can’t believe it’s only Tuesday. This is a shorter-than-usual note due to a scheduling squeeze. I was going to write about economic indicators, but, you know, news happens…

You’re reading the daily premium Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, where I look at the growing overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. There’s also usually some market commentary, but NOTHING I say is investment advice. For full disclosure, I have held the same long positions in BTC and ETH for years, and have no intention to either buy more or sell in the near future.

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Programming note: this newsletter will be taking a break from Thursday, November 23 until Sunday, November 26.

IN THIS NEWSLETTER:

• More regulatory shoes are dropping

• The market reaction

• Leading indicator signals a recession?

• Argentine president-elect is already offending key trade partners

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

More regulatory shoes are dropping

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a quiet news week in the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday?

Yesterday, we saw whopping regulatory moves against two key crypto ecosystem players: Kraken and Binance.

First, remember the rumblings that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was investigating Binance? Many of us were wondering where they were on that and why it was taking so long to come to some sort of conclusion.

Yesterday, we got our answer. It turns out that the DoJ has been figuring out how much it can get out of Binance in exchange for making the investigation go away, sorry, I mean how much a reasonable fine for its infractions would be. Bloomberg reported that the DoJ was seeking $4 billion from Binance Holdings as part of a proposed resolution, with founder CZ possibly facing criminal charges.