European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde thinks cryptocurrencies aren’t worth a dime. “My very humble assessment is that it is worth nothing,” Lagarde said of crypto in an interview with Dutch talk show “College Tour” that aired Sunday. “It is based on nothing,” she added. “There is no underlying asset to act as an anchor of safety.” Lagarde called on global policymakers to put rules in place to protect inexperienced investors making big bets on digital assets. Cryptocurrencies have plunged across the board this year, with bitcoin — the world’s largest — erasing more than half of its value since its November all-time highs. “I’m concerned about those people who think it’s going to be a reward, who have no understanding of the risks, who will lose it all, and who will be terribly disappointed, which is why I believe that should be regulated,”.  One member of the show’s audience said they lost 7,000 euros ($7,469) after buying the token cardano, to which Lagarde responded: “That hurts.” The former IMF Chief’s skepticism of crypto isn’t new. She’s previously raised concerns about the environmental impact of digital currencies, as well as their potential use in money laundering and sanctions evasion. 

In public, Binance said it welcomed government oversight. At the same time, the firm was withholding information from regulators, maintaining weak checks on customers and acting against its own compliance department’s recommendations, a Reuters investigation has found.  Read on for more sordid details of how Binance manipulated everyone to get their business up and running.  Well done to the Reuter's staff for this very in-depth investigation into Binance.  It does make you wonder with all of this crypto stuff hitting the skids of recent on whether or not this is something worth investing in, the risks seem to great to me at least to be mucking around with this stuff.  Your mileage may vary of course.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard warned Monday that investors should be careful when investing in cryptocurrencies, and dismissed most of them as “worthless.”  In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Bullard admitted that digital currencies that are able to “facilitate transactions that are difficult to make in conventional currencies” do have a place alongside fiat currencies.  However: “We have a couple of thousand of these around, most of them are worthless,”.  Bullard encouraged investors to be aware of the inherent risks in cryptocurrency investing — particularly concerning price volatility — and to “be careful.”  “I think for the most part, people like going into this with eyes wide open, they’re certainly not blind to the idea that this is a volatile area,” he told Yahoo Finance.  Still, Bullard said there are “lots of interesting things going on in this space,” and added that “of course the Fed is also looking at a Fed coin.”  “We’ve got a lot going on, watching this very carefully,”.  Separately Monday, Fed Gov. Lael Brainard said the central bank is keeping a close eye on China’s efforts to develop a digital currency, and said it’s critical that the Fed be “at the table” in any development of standards for central-bank digital currencies. Last week, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank will ramp up its exploration of a digital dollar this summer, stressing it would not be a replacement for cash.

Several signs are pointing to institutional investors as big drivers of the wild price action on the way up.  “Although retail buying was portrayed as the main driver of the extreme price rally experienced by some stocks, the actual picture may be much more nuanced,” JPMorgan’s quant team uses a proprietary methodology to identify which flows are from retail traders. GameStop was number 15 on the firm’s retail buying list for January.  The rookie investor “vigilantes” grabbed the most attention by being all over social media, posting screenshots of their positions and crucifying Robinhood and other brokers when the firms were forced to limit trading. However, it’s possible the noise from this crowd caused most to overlook Wall Street co-opting this trade to make a fast buck as well, data shows.  “Maybe it’s not as much of just the little guy versus the big guy,”  “I think that it’s reasonable to say that institutional investors were also very active in those stocks last week because there are institutional investors that participate in names that have elevated volume. I think most likely that was also expressed in some of the options activity last week as well.”  Retail investors were actually net sellers of GameStop from Tuesday through Thursday last week, according to data from Citadel Securities.

The best leaders: (1.) Have a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo. Not sometimes. All times.  (2.) Are relentless in their quest for continuous improvement and expect the same from everyone. This trait will sort out the doers from the pretenders. 

(3.) Have high expectations and hold people accountable for results. See No. 2 above. (4.) Have a vision of excellence that is communicated broadly and frequently. (5.) Communicate a clear priority set. This kind of prioritization by leadership clears the way to hold people accountable for doing the right things -- which will move the needle on the company’s most important business objectives. (6.) Don’t pass the buck when there is bad news. If it happened on our watch as leaders, we own it.  (7.) Run to the problems and deal with them. (8.) See opportunities others don’t. This is often why leaders are in their leadership roles and others aren’t.  Engineers and maintenance people are often great examples to observe as well. They’re always trying to understand how things work and why. It’s in their DNA. (9.) Are the ones who care the most and make everyone around them better. Leaders are always under observation. Are they fully competent? (10.) Know when it’s time to tell someone goodbye.

As states push forward in their phased reopenings, we’re getting clues that the beleaguered U.S economy might be on its way to recovery. Retail sales spiked by 17.7 percent in May, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped in that month as well — suggesting that Americans were returning to work and opening their wallets earlier than many expected. But experts still think that even if things are starting to look up now, we shouldn’t assume we’ll be back to normal anytime soon. In fact, economists think there are still significant economic risks despite the tentative rebound, including a second wave of COVID-19, an unwillingness to spend from consumers and an absence of an additional fiscal stimulus from Congress.  In partnership with the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, FiveThirtyEight asked 34 quantitative macroeconomic economists what they thought about a variety of subjects around the coronavirus recession and recovery efforts. The most recent survey, which was conducted from June 19 through 22, echoed many of the predictions from the last round — though there were also a few new wrinkles in their forecasts.

When we first asked about the shape of the recovery, 58 percent of respondents thought the trajectory of future U.S. gross domestic product looked like a Nike “swoosh” — a sharp downturn followed by a long, slow recovery. This time around, however, a consensus has formed around a slightly different shape: a reverse radical (i.e., a mirrored version of the square-root symbol).  This shape — which 73 percent of our economists predicted for the country’s economic future — implies a steep drop followed by a quick partial recovery and a longer period of slower, mixed growth. But it isn’t necessarily an improvement over the swoosh. “There is nothing standard or smooth about this recovery,” said Lisa Cook, professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. In her view, a reverse-radical-shaped recovery could be shaped by a spike in infections and hospitalizations, a wave of bankruptcies as unemployment benefits expire or consumers’ unwillingness to return to gyms, nail salons or other parts of their routine. That could make the bounce back from this recession bumpier than previous recessions.  Twelve of the 17 economists who had predicted a swoosh in our survey in late May changed to the reverse radical this time, leaving just five respondents sticking with the swoosh in this round of the survey. (And no economist switched to the swoosh, another sign that other patterns fit the trajectory of this economic recovery better.)

The European Central Bank has just added to the boatloads of pandemic stimulus out there, credited for shielding stocks and investors from bad news. But stock futures are under pressure, which could threaten yet another winning session for the S&P 500  The index is up 40% from its March 23 lows, and some are nervous. It might be time to hold onto that long-term investing plan with both hands. Our call of the day, from Brad Neuman, investment strategist at equities manager Alger, is banking on 50-year technological revolutions, noting we’ve just finished one that has ended with smartphones and information in the palm of your hand.  “We think that we’re in a new long-term technological revolution, which we call the age of connected intelligence…and that means we think that there’s going to be a lot of connected devices,” Neuman tells MarketWatch. Think the “Internet of Things” and lots more data being produced and processed in the cloud, and more access to that data for everyone at an affordable price.   “Ultimately, all of that data being analyzed by these very advanced hardware and software systems manifests itself in artificial intelligence and better decision making,” he says.

Three years after Facebook announced its ill-fated push into cryptocurrency, aka the Libra project, the tech giant has signalled another scaling back of its activity — announcing Friday that Novi, the digital wallet payments pilot it launched last October, will be ending on on September 1. The wallet project was generally hampered by Meta’s crypto ambitions never having panned out as hoped — in the face of regulatory push-back and withering support.   In a statement provided to CoinDesk, the tech giant that’s now known as Meta suggested it has plans to repurpose the digital wallet technology (neé Calibra) for future products, including those related to its eponymous focus on “metaverse” development. Although it’s not clear exactly what Meta might have in mind for repurposing the Novi tech. Senior Meta execs have talked up the metaverse as a major opportunity for digital commerce. Albeit, they’ve also cautioned over the lengthy timescales that will be required to develop the sought for market — suggesting it could take decades.   Following years of governance scandals, it’s fair to say that Facebook’s reputational troubles impeded its ability to ‘move fast and break things’, as crypto raised the stakes for regulatory concerns, around issues like money laundering and currency volatility. There is, for example, no mention of the wider crypto market free fall that’s led to dramatic sell offs in recent months and ramped up scrutiny of stablecoins over concerns about stability. Nor any reference to rising attention internationally on crypto regulation. Changing market conditions are surely further cooling Meta’s interest.

“If you look at the large Fortune 500 companies 50 years ago, many of them no longer exist,” says Ilya Strebulaev, a professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor Wang. “The big reason why was their failure to innovate.” It’s only in the last decade that corporate venture capital (CVC) has gained traction as a way to remain relevant and stay ahead of competitors. In 2020, CVC arms invested more than $70 billion in startups, accounting for a 1/4 of all VC deals.  . The way these CVC arms are organized, "is not very efficient". The interviewees mentioned corporate and financial constraints as well as a general lack of knowledge about VC among corporate leadership. More than 60% of the senior execs Strebulaev and Wang spoke with confided that their parent companies do not understand the norms of venture capital.  Most CVC units use a 2-tier decision-making process, often requiring near-unanimous approval from a committee outside the team.  Traditional VC firms, also secretive, typically follow a well-worn playbook for structuring leadership and decision-making processes for their investments. CVC, do not, nor are they straightforward. Strebulaev says many of the barriers faced by corporate VCs likely stem from complicated objectives, corporate culture, and the relative newness of corporate venture capital. He says that often corporations trying to get in on the action have launched their CVC arms in an ad hoc fashion.  Instead, he advises, they should carefully design these units to be as efficient as possible from the start. When corporations are planning to launch a CVC unit, making a serious commitment to a long-term investment is critical. “If you design corporate venture capital units imperfectly,” Strebulaev says, “then you will not get as many results. Or maybe you will not get any results.”

Pressure is mounting on Wikipedia to stop accepting crypto, amid criticism of its environmental impact.  Mozilla also came under heavy criticism for its decision to accept cryptocurrency donations. None other than one of the founders of Mozilla lambasted the organization for its decision, prompting an about-face.  Wikipedia is now facing pressure to stop accepting crypto as well, with a “Requests for comments” page opened to discuss the situation. The user who opened the page, GorillaWarfare, explained three specific issues with accepting crypto. (1) Concern that accepting crypto signaled endorsement (2) The environmental impact of crypto (3) The potential to damage Wikipedia’s reputation . It’s too early to know how Wikipedia will proceed, but the discussion is another example of the headwinds crypto faces in its bid for widespread acceptance.

The Nasdaq’s retreat from its all-time highs last month is now officially considered a correction in a bull market. The tech-heavy index on Monday closed down 2.22% unofficially at 12,633.61, roughly 10.6% below the Feb. 12 record close at 14,095.47 and exceeding the 10% closing-basis threshold considered by market professionals as confirmation of a correction. The Nasdaq entered the latest bull market last March and rose more than 105% from the pandemic low a year ago. Market-leading tech and tech-adjacent megacap stocks, which account for much of the Nasdaq’s total market value, thrived during the pandemic recession. But many of those shares are now seen by some investors as overvalued.

More cyclical stocks, which were battered by shutdowns and stand to benefit most from economic recovery, have since gained favor as vaccine deployment gathers steam and restrictions are lifted.

One of the most prominent figures on the WallStreetBets subreddit that sent GameStop stock skyrocketing has been slapped with a lawsuit. The suit alleges Keith Gill (aka Roaring Kitty) is a licensed securities professional instead of an amateur investor and it claims he profited from the GameStop short squeeze by manipulating the market. “Gill’s deceitful and manipulative conduct not only violated numerous industry regulations and rules but also various securities laws by undermining the integrity of the market for GameStop shares,” the proposed class-action suit says. “He caused enormous losses not only to those who bought option contracts but also to those who fell for Gill’s act and bought GameStop stock during the market frenzy at greatly inflated prices.” GameStop stock rose to a record high of $483 eventually dropping back to ~$45. Many amateur traders raked in hundreds or thousands of dollars from the GameStop stock, some hedge funds lost billions as they scrambled to cover their bets against the company. According to the filing, Gill "actively worked as a professional in the investment and financial industries" for many years and claims he holds a number of securities licenses and qualifications, including a Charted Financial Analyst license.

Several US government agencies are investigating the GameStop stock brouhaha to determine whether there was market manipulation involved having created what’s known as a short squeeze. The DOJ

 and the US Attorney for San Francisco are seeking information about activity surrounding GameStop’s stock by brokers and users on Reddit and other social media sites. Prosecutors have subpoenaed information from brokers, including Robinhood, where much of the trading activity occurred.  The SECC is also looking into whether there was manipulation and probing whether Robinhood and other brokerages that temporarily froze or otherwise restricted trading of GME were in compliance with federal regulations. Robinhood is also facing dozens of lawsuits after it restricted several stocks popular on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, with people alleging the company sought to “manipulate the market” to help other financial institutions.

The House Financial Services Committee is holding a hearing into the GameStop drama on February 18th, where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev are expected to appear.

Robinhood did not immediately respond for comment.

The nation’s labor-market recovery stalled in December, as a resurgence of the coronavirus and state-imposed restrictions ended seven months of job growth. Employers cut 140,000 jobs last month, the first decline since the pandemic hit the country last spring, the Labor Department said Friday. The jobless rate held steady at 6.7%, far below its April peak of 14.8%—a post-World War II high—but still almost twice its pre-pandemic level.  Restaurants and bars drove last month’s decline. Forced to close or scale down because of the virus and cold weather, they cut 372,000 jobs. Other industries highly vulnerable to the spread of virus—hotels, museums, tourist sites—laid off workers, as did government agencies and schools.  Most other sectors added jobs last month, but the gains weren’t enough to offset the sharp decline in areas sensitive to the state of the pandemic.

“We have one sector in particular that is undergoing some extreme difficulties right now,” said economist Gus Faucher of PNC Financial Services . “The rest of the economy looks pretty solid.”

The impact of COVID-19 has extended into the decision-making process that determines where a company will locate.  Suburban areas and mid-size cities, followed by rural areas, will be the biggest winners of new corporate expansions and relocations, with large urban areas falling to the bottom of the list, according to a survey releads on July 16 by the Site Selectors Guild.  “Everything from physical distancing to changing transit preferences has affected the way that corporations view location decisions,” said Rick Weddle, CEO of the Site Selectors Guild.  Conducted the week of June 29, 2020, in partnership with Development Counsellors International (DCI), the survey of Guild members aimed to uncover changes and new trends in corporate location strategy brought on by the COVID-19 crisis. The top findings of this research follow:  Suburbs and Mid-Size Cities Will Be the Next Winners for Corporate Location Projects.  The pandemic has brought suburban areas and mid-size cities into the forefront of consideration for future site selection projects and even put rural areas well ahead of large urban areas. When members were asked about locations that are “likely” or “very likely” to be considered by corporations looking to expand, relocate or open new facilities in the next 12 months, 64% chose suburban areas, 57% chose mid-size cities, 31% chose rural areas, and just 10% chose large urban areas.  

Consultants indicated that New York would be hit especially hard among the nation’s largest cities. Of the consultants who agreed that large urban centers are “not at all” or “unlikely” to be considered for future projects, 100% said that New York City would be among the least likely locations to be considered for future projects in the next 12 months. Los Angeles and Chicago followed with 63% and 42%, respectively.

Innovation, which is all about change in processes and products, is a challenging and sometimes frustrating process when you don't understand what kind of, and depth of organizational resistance you face in deploying a change into your or another's organization.

• I strongly recommend a review of this video from the Oxford Review's YouTube channel on how to increase adoption of your innovation that your company needs by taking an Evidence-Based approach, in attempting to plan and do that implementation activity, because it is a scientific approach that you can use to learn your way to a successful implementation. 
• If you're involved in Organizational Change, Organizational Development, or just want to learn more about the real nuts and bolts of "Change Agency" that is actually effective, then I strongly recommend, signing up for a subscription at the Oxford-Review, the information, knowledge, "know-how", and outright wisdom you will find that the Oxford-Review is your "Go To Source" for helping you to manage the change process, methods, tools, frameworks and understanding to make your more effective are found here.  I cannot recommend it more highly.   

W hen innovation is the lifeblood, of your company, you can’t rely solely on the fickleness of inspiration. Dow answers these dictates with a systematic blend of Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and the creativity method known as TRIZ, which supplants inspiration with investigation. It has proven to be a powerful combination.  “Six Sigma and DFSS bring the kind of up-front decision making that makes sure the problems you’re workingon are important to the business,” said Tom Kling, a longtime Dow employee who served as Master Black Belt for

the installation and start-up of Six Sigma and DFSS in the
company’s 1,700-person corporate R&D department.  TRIZ, on the other hand, “helps you arrive at new solutions by importing technical solutions or scientific principles from other disciplines,” he said. “So you solve design problems much more quickly.”

While Bitcoin ended the day with a 4 percent decline in its value, Ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, plummeted by 13 percent against the US dollar, becoming one of the worst performing major cryptocurrencies alongside NEO.

Tokens recorded the steepest drop in their value on August 11, as most Ethereum-based tokens such as Theta Token, Aion, Pundi X, Aelf, DigixDAO, WanChain, and VeChain recorded a drop of around 14 to 18 percent.

Bitcoin Breaks 50% Dominance

For the first time in 2018, Bitcoin, the most dominant cryptocurrency in the global market, has obtained 50 percent of the market share, securing its year-to-date (YTD) high on the dominance index.

The sudden increase in the dominance index of Bitcoin which coincided with the spike in the volume of Tether have demonstrated that investors have become reluctant towards taking high-risk and high-return trades, mostly due to the lack of confidence in the short-term trend of the market.

Over the past few weeks, tokens have lost over 50 percent of their value against Bitcoin, which has also fallen by more than 20 percent since late July. For instance, EOS, dubbed the “Ethereum Killer,” has dropped 50 percent of its market valuation in the past 30 days, due to the instability and volatility in the market.

In recent months, the volume of BTC and the rest of the crypto market have substantially decreased. In late July, when BTC initiated a promising run to the higher end of $8,000, its volume neared the $6 billion mark.

As of August 11, the volume of BTC remains below $4.4 billion while the volume of Tether (USDT), a stablecoin whose value is hedged to that of the US dollar, has increased to $2.8 billion, more than $1.2 billion higher than the volume of Ethereum.

Since July, traders have discovered that the price trend of small cap tokens generally follow the price trend of XRP and EOS. In the past 24 hours, Ripple and EOS have dropped 11 percent of their value against the US dollar.

Where Does the Market go Next?

Due to the overly strong downtrend of major cryptocurrencies, in order for the cryptocurrency market to engage in a large mid-term bull run, the market would need to bottom out at a lower price range.

Yesterday, on August 10, CCN reported that analysts see BTC testing a major support level at around $5,800.

“If the price movement of BTC in the short-term plays out the same way as February, April, and May, BTC will likely fall below $6,000 in the upcoming days, possibly bottoming out at $5,700