Crypto Update | Big-Name Banks Make Crypto Moves Noelle Acheson, the mind behind the Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter, explores market moves, Black Friday, banks moving into crypto and more.Noelle Acheson, the mind behind the Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter, explores market moves, Black Friday, banks moving into crypto and more.To get the show every day, follow the podcast [here](https://link.chtbl.com/rnT0IiTu).Today’s Stories: From our sponsors: CME Group Cryptocurrency futures and options provide market-leading liquidity for bitcoin and ether trading.These cash-settled contracts give full exposure to crypto performance without the hassle of holding the physical position.No digital wallet? No problem.
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This episode was hosted by Noelle Acheson.“Markets Daily” is executive produced by Jared Schwartz and produced and edited by Eleanor Pahl.All original music by [ Doc Blust](https://soundcloud.com/therituallive) and Colin Mealey.Audio Transcript: This transcript has not been edited and may contain errors.
It’s Monday, November 27th, 2023 and this is Markets Daily from CoinDesk.My name is Noelle Acheson, CoinDesk collaborator and author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter on Substack.On today’s show we’re talking about market moves, Black Friday, banks moving into crypto and more.So you don’t miss an episode, be sure to follow the podcast on your platform of choice, and turn on notifications.
And just a reminder, CoinDesk is a news source and does not provide investment advice.Now, a markets roundup.
Crypto prices are retreating slightly, after a U.S.holiday weekend that saw bitcoin briefly rise past $38,400 dollars.According to CoinDesk Indices, at 9 a.m.eastern time today, bitcoin was down 1 and a half percent over the past 24 hours, trading at 36,950 dollars.Ether was down 2.9%, trading at 2,024 dollars.
Sharper drops were seen in Solana, Chainlink and Stellar, all down roughly 5%.
In macro indicators, let’s look at U.S.consumers again.In market terms, calling any day “Black” evokes doom and despair.On Black Monday in October 1987, the Dow Jones dropped by almost 23%.
Black Thursday in October 1929 kicked off a series of crashes that led to the Great Depression.So, calling any day “Black” does not sound like a great marketing gimmick, and yet in the U.S.
it seems to work.The Friday after Thanksgiving is known as “Black Friday”, when retailers traditionally mark the beginning of the holiday shopping season by offering steep discounts.Expectations for this year’s Black Friday were relatively low, going by the cautious tone of retailer’s Q3 earnings calls.
I spoke about this in more detail in the November 17th episode, if you want to go back and give that a listen.It turns out that retail executives were right to be cautious.One well-regarded metric to track Black Friday sales comes from Mastercard Spendingpulse, which measures in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment.
Back in September it said that it expected U.S.retail sales, excluding cars, to grow 3.7% during the holiday season.On Friday, sales rose 2.5%.What’s more, this figure is not adjusted for inflation.Since core CPI is increasing at a 4% annual rate, sales effectively dropped in real terms.And remember, this is a day in which in theory you can get things much cheaper.
Shoppers holding back on bargain hunting is not a great sign.Online sales did pretty well.According to Salesforce, U.S.online sales grew 9% year-on-year.A separate measure from Adobe Analytics showed e-commerce sales on Friday increasing by 7.5% from Black Friday last year.There’s a worrying detail in there, though.
Adobe reports that the number of purchases leaning on a buy-now, pay-later option climbed by 72% from the week before Thanksgiving.Of course, a positive spin could be that shoppers don’t care so much about bargains now, which suggests purchases could accelerate in weeks to come.That doesn’t feel very convincing, though.In stocks, uncertainty about macroeconomic indicators is keeping stock performance muted as investors wait for some clearer signals.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were flat in Friday’s shortened trading, while the Dow Jones rose a third of a percent.So far this morning, futures are pointing to a soft opening.A similar mood seems to be holding in Europe.On Friday, the FTSE 100 was flat, while the DAX was up two tenths and the Eurostoxx 600 was up a third.
So far today, the main indices are down between one and two-tenths of a percent.In Asia, traders seem to be feeling a bit more nervous, with Japan’s Nikkei index dropping half a percent, the Shanghai Composite losing a third and the Hang Seng falling two tenths.In commodities, oil prices continued to drop as traders await the OPEC+ meeting later this week.I mentioned in last Wednesday’s episode that the meeting, which was scheduled for this past weekend, had been postponed until Thursday, apparently due to Saudi Arabia’s irritation at the production levels of some of the African members.
This suggests that there could be more supply than the market had been discounting.Earlier today, the Brent Crude benchmark was down almost 1% on the day, trading at $80 dollars and 22 cents a barrel.Gold, on the other hand, continues to climb! Earlier today, it reached $2,018 dollars per ounce, its highest level in six months.This pickup in interest is most likely driven by the weakening of the U.S.dollar relative to other currencies, in line with growing expectations of U.S.
rate cuts over the next few months.The DXY index, which measures the dollar against a basket of currencies, is down three percent over the past month.Stay with us – after the break we’re going to talk about an unlikely coupling: large legacy banks and crypto services.
Welcome back! In this section, we’re going to go over to Austria, where yet another big-name bank is launching crypto services.Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank will roll out cryptocurrency trading in January 2024.Raiffeisen is the country’s second-largest financial institution, founded almost 100 years ago, so this is a big deal.It announced its intentions to do this back in April, via a partnership with crypto exchange Bitpanda.
But I confess I half thought that would be the last we’d hear of it, because Raiffeisen Bank and crypto are not natural partners.The bank has a reputation for being conservative, in an already conservative banking community.What’s more, the crypto currency trading will be available to retail traders.This is not the only bank announcing crypto moves over the past month.Earlier in November, we heard that Swiss bank St.Galler Kantonalbank is now offering bitcoin and ether brokerage and custody to its retail and commercial clients.
St.Galler was founded in, get this, 1868 and is now the fourth-largest government-owned commercial bank in Switzerland.Last week, CoinDesk reported that a private banking division of Spanish bank Banco Santander is offering bitcoin and ether trading to high-net-worth clients with Swiss accounts.And, leaving Europe, a few weeks ago we heard that Thailand’s second largest bank had acquired 97% of a crypto exchange.This is not yet a stampede of banks rushing into crypto services – but these steps are meaningful, and the announcements feel more frequent.Whether this will move the dial on crypto adoption in the short-term remains to be seen.
But it’s hard to deny that having large and established and old financial institutions acknowledge that crypto markets are viable lines of business and that there is demand for the assets – well, that has to send a strong message to both regulators and investors still on the sidelines..
