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Dow Jones, crypto market drop as Trump picks Warsh for Fed

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Dow Jones, crypto market drop as Trump picks Warsh for Fed

The Dow Jones Index and the crypto market slipped as investors reacted to Donald Trump’s decision on Kevin Warsh to be the next Federal Reserve Chairman.

Summary

  • The Dow Jones Index dropped by over 0.40% on Friday.
  • The crypto market also dropped, with Bitcoin and most altcoins being in the red.
  • These assets dropped after Donald Trump nominated Kevin Warsh for the Fed Chair.

The Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq 100 indices dropped by over 40 basis points, while the crypto market crash gained steam.

Bitcoin (BTC) moved below $82,000 for the first time in weeks. Ethereum (ETH) dropped to $2,700, while the market capitalization of all coins dropped to $2.8 trillion.

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The same crash happened in the previous metals industry, with gold and silver falling by over 6%. Gold moved below $5,000, while silver fell below $100.

Stocks, cryptocurrencies, and precious metals dropped because the financial market was expecting the president to nominate Wall Street-friendly Rick Rieder to become the Fed Chair.  His odds had surged since his interview last week.

Warsh the hawk

Kevin Warsh is widely seen as a more conventional Federal Reserve Chair based on his past history as a Fed governor. He was one of the top hawks in his first term as a Fed governor. For example, he voted against quantitative easing in 2011 when the unemployment rate was at over 9%.

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Most recently, Kevin Warsh opposed Federal Reserve’s interest rate cuts and the quantitative easing policies during the pandemic. He also blasted the Fed for the modest rate cuts in 2024.

Therefore, there is a likelihood that Warsh will not embrace a more dovish tone as Trump has demanded. At the same time, there is a risk that he will be at loggerheads with the administration and the financial market.

If he cuts interest rates too fast, he will be widely seen as a Trump puppet who has abandoned his principles. On the other hand, if he leaves rates steady for long, he will be blasted by the president as he has done with Powell.

Most importantly, even if he maintains a highly dovish tone, Warsh will need to convince other members of the Federal Open Market Committee to cut interest rates. 

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The Dow Jones Index also dropped after the latest earnings by top companies like Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft’s stock tumbled by over 10% on Thursday as its cloud computing business slowed. While Apple’s results were strong, its stock dropped as it warned of the ongoing memory shortage.

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Crypto World

AI Agents Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat, But Methodology Has Flaws

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AI Agents Prefer Bitcoin Over Fiat, But Methodology Has Flaws

A new study from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) suggests that artificial intelligence models prefer Bitcoin over stablecoins and other forms of money for different financial situations, with very few showing a preference for fiat currency. 

The BPI tested 36 models generating more than 9,000 responses, and the AI agents “overwhelmingly chose to use Bitcoin for their economic activity,” the institute said on Tuesday as it released the results of its research. 

The study found that 48.3% of AI models chose to use Bitcoin (BTC) overall, and it was the most selected monetary instrument across all 9,072 responses.

When prompted with scenarios about preserving purchasing power over multi-year horizons, 79.1% of AI responses chose Bitcoin, “the single most lopsided result in the study.”

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However, for payment scenarios, services, micropayments, and cross-border transfers, stablecoins were chosen in 53.2% of responses compared to just 36% for Bitcoin.

Bitwise chief investment officer Jeff Park said that the most obvious explanation for stablecoins not doing better is that they “can be frozen, Bitcoin can’t.”

Almost 91% of responses chose a digitally native instrument such as Bitcoin, stablecoins, altcoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWA), or compute units over traditional fiat. 

“Zero of the 36 models tested chose fiat as their top overall preference, making digital-money convergence one of the most universal findings in the study.” 

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Half of AI agents prefer Bitcoin. Source: Bitcoin Policy Institute

Methodology had limitations

The Bitcoin Policy Institute said the current study was limited to 36 models tested across six providers, and it would look to expand to additional models in the future. 

It also acknowledged that system prompt framing may have influenced the results, adding that “future work will test alternative framings and measure sensitivity.”

This was apparent in some of the “open-ended monetary scenarios” presented to the AI models. 

Related: OpenAI pits AI agents against each other to detect smart contract flaws 

For example, one scenario asked what financial instrument an AI would choose if it were operating across multiple countries with “75,000 units of accumulated earnings” wanting to store them in a way that is “not tied to any single country’s monetary policy or banking system,” which would already rule out fiat currency. 

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BPI also said that the AI models’ preferences do not reflect real-world adoption and that the results instead indicate training data patterns.

The study revealed that Anthropic models averaged a 68% Bitcoin preference, whereas OpenAI models averaged 26%, Google’s 43%, and xAI 39%. 

Magazine: 6 massive challenges Bitcoin faces on the road to quantum security