JPMorgan strategist Marko Kolanovic worries that stagflation will hit the US again. Unlike the expert, Wall Street generally believes that the world's largest economy will have a soft landing. Mr. Kolanovic is currently JPMorgan's chief strategist, Bloomberg reported. He attracted investors' attention when he made gloomy comments about the US stock market amid a sharp increase in stock prices last year.
The S&P 500 index reached a new peak on Thursday (February 22), after chip manufacturing giant Nvidia announced quarterly business results much better than forecast, thereby promoting market and technology sector. At the end of the trading session on February 22, the S&P 500 index increased 2.11% to 5,087.03 points, recording the best session since January 2023. The Nasdaq Composite Index added 2.96% to 16,041.62 points, also recording the strongest increase since February 2023. The index is very close to its all-time closing high of 16,057.44 points. The Dow Jones index increased 456.87 points (equivalent to 1.18%) to 39,069.11 points, surpassing the 39,000 mark for the first time.
After the news of raising $14 million in strategic capital from many large organizations on February 19, Ethena Labs continued to announce the launch of the community mainnet with the Shard program. Ethena Labs, the developer behind stablecoin USDe on Ethereum, has received $14 million in a strategic funding round led by Dragonfly and the Maelstrom investment fund of Arthur Hayes, former CEO of BitMEX. Ethena previously also received the support of many large CEX exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, OKX, Deribit, Kraken and Gemini. Despite having invested more than 50 million USD, Ethena still proactively limited the fundraising round to 14 million USD because it currently does not need additional capital. After this capital call information, Ethena was valued at 300 million USD.
This year Berkshire actively bought US government bonds, despite Fitch Ratings lowering the US credit rating from AAA to AA+. On August 3, Warren Buffett - Chairman and CEO of Berkshire - said on CNBC that they bought $10 billion in US government bonds that week alone. "The only question for next Monday is whether we will buy 10 billion USD in 3-month or 6-month terms," he said.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced the delisting of 4 coins, the most notable of which are Monero (XMR) and Multichain (MULTI). Binance in mid-2023 also limited the ability to use those coins in sensitive jurisdictions like Europe, before stopping the delisting of XMR altogether.