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Stocks continued their quiet post-holiday stretch on Thursday with all three major indexes little changed from the start of the day.

The light trading pushed stocks slightly lower for the day.

We've got the headlines, but first, the scoreboard:

• Dow: 19,821.77, -11.91, (0.06%)
• S&P 500: 2,249.41, -0.51, (0.02%)
• Nasdaq: 5,432.09, -6.47, (0.12%)
• US 10-year yield: -3.3 basis points at 2.475%

1. Sears is getting another loan from its CEO. Investor Eddie Lampert, now the CEO of Sears Holdings, will give the retailer $200 million with the option to expand the loan to $500 million. This move comes just a few days after the company told employees it will be shutting down 30 Sears and Kmart stores in early 2017.
2. The ruble shook off new Obama's new sanctions against the Russian government. The currency strengthened slightly after the administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and the closure of two Russian facilities in New York City and Maryland.
3. US Treasury yields slid. Prices of US government bonds gained for the second straight day. Yields hit their lowest levels in two weeks with the 10 year around 2.466%.
4. Initial jobless claims fell to 265,000. The number was right in line with economists' expectations and marks the 95th week in a row that claims have been under 300,000.

ADDITIONALLY:

The GOP could push out the repeal of Obamacare until after the 2020 presidential election.

Trump's pick for budget chief really like gold and bitcoin.

25 'dogs of the S&P' that could crush it in early 2017.

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The post Bitcoin Magazine’s Top 6 Tech Trends of 2016 appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

With the election of Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers finally have a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, in their sights.

Despite holding control of the presidency and the legislature, a repeal of Obamacare may not come as soon as "day one" like leaders like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have said.

According to Bloomberg's Sahil Kupar, there is no consensus among Republicans as to when a repeal should take place, but GOP staffers are floating the idea of waiting until after the 2020 presidential election.

A number of the plans put forth so far by Republicans would feature a "repeal and delay" mechanism, in which a law is passed that "repeals" the ACA, but only goes into effect after a given period of time. This, the thinking goes, would give lawmakers enough time to craft a replacement and also avoid possible political fall out from a repeal.

Additionally, given that over 20 million people have gotten health insurance through various provisions of the ACA, pulling the rug out from under these Americans could be politically dangerous for Republicans.

The original "repeal and delay" plan that was floated in November would have delayed the repeal date until 2019, after the first mid-term election.

Obviously this move would carry significant risks. Politically, Trump could lose his re-election bid, thus denying the GOP a chance at repeal. From the market side, a long delay could cause insurers to pull out of the individual insurance market in anticipation of the move, destabilizing coverage for millions and causing prices in the market to soar.

Bloomberg also reported that Republicans are planning to present the current Obamacare law as failing on its own, thus making repeal more palatable despite the coverage increases.

Counter to this narrative, however, the Department of Health and Human Services reported last week that 6.4 million people have signed up for Obamacare exchange plans since open enrollment began on November 1— the quickest sign-up pace in the history of the exchanges.

Granted, premiums have increased significantly for 2017 and there are still too few young people on the exchanges, but the number of people signing up for the plans is not collapsing.

While the GOP could delay repeal anywhere between two to four years, the biggest challenge will be coming up with a replacement plan and while there have been a number of plans floated — from Paul Ryan's Better way to Trump's HHS pick Tom Price's Empowering Patient's First Act — a consensus replacement has yet to be reached.

SEE ALSO: Trump's pick for budget chief loves gold and bitcoin

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The man in charge of bringing together President-elect Donald Trump's federal budget is a big believer in gold, according to financial disclosures.

Mick Mulvaney, Trump's pick for the Office of Budget and Management, owns significant amounts of precious metals and gold mining stocks based on financial disclosures compiled by Bloomberg.

According to the filings, Mulvaney held between $50,000 and $100,000 in precious metals at the end of 2015. In addition, the current South Carolina Representative holds stock in a number of gold and silver mining corporations totaling between $252,000 and $855,000 according to the filing.

Bloomberg found that Mulvaney had sold significant amounts of the gold miners' stock in early 2016, according to financial filings from the end of June.

The heavy investments into gold is not surprising given that Mulvaney has criticized the Federal Reserve. In a speech obtained by Mother Jones, Mulvaney told the John Birch Society (which it should be noted, is a group that believes the only legal form of currency are gold and silver coins) that the Fed has "effectively devalued the dollar" and "choke[d] off economic growth."

In the same speech, Mulvaney also praised bitcoin, saying the cryptocurrency cannot be "manipulated" by the government.

Gold mining stocks have had an up and down year. VanEck's Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF — the largest gold mining sector ETF in which Mulvaney had an investment (between $15,001 and $50,000) — is up 45% year-to-date, but well off its high of the year in August, down roughly 35% over that time.

Since the election, the dollar has strengthened by a little over 5% while gold has fallen roughly 10%. Bitcoin has been surging in the past week, hitting its highest level since November 2013 on Thursday.

Check out the full Bloomberg report here»

SEE ALSO: Trump's pick for budget chief could make one of his biggest campaign promises less likely

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The Bank of England is not normally regarded as a font of innovation, but earlier this year it took steps to change that by starting its own fintech startup accelerator. 

The BoE has chosen seven companies — BitSight, Privitar, PwC, BMLL, Anomali, ThreatConnct, and Enforcd — to generate proof-of-concept projects with the BoE. They are looking at machine learning, security threats, bitcoin and the blockchain, and data privacy, and how those issues might affect banking.

The BoE won't be investing in these companies, but in order to encourage involvement from startups it is allowing the selected companies to advertise the fact that the Bank is a client. 

The accelerator is a significant cultural change for the BoE. Until now, its institutional role has largely been regarded as reactive not predictive: It does research to understand what is happening in the economy, it regulates banking to weed out bad behaviour, and of course it sets the base level interest rate on the pound through monetary policy. All the companies in the accelerator, however, are in one way or another focused on the future, identifying threats or opportunities that the Bank may need to deal with next. 

"We don’t want to be the wild west, and we don’t want to strangle innovation at birth," BoE Chief Operating Officer Charlotte Hogg told Business Insider during an on-stage discussion at Web Summit in Lisbon. "So we need to know what is going on and how it affects what we care about, which is the safety and soundness of banks, protection of insurance holders, and the resilience of the system." 

Among those threats are hackers and bitcoin. Hackers proved that central banks are vulnerable to theft earlier this year when the Central Bank of Bangladesh lost $101 million in fraudulent transactions to a phishing scheme. The hackers had attempted to defraud the bank of $951 million in cash but the caper was interrupted before it was complete. Only $18 million has been recovered. 

"I think whatever kind of institution you are the threat is evolving and it is significant," Hogg says. "And so the onus is on every institution to be proactive in their defence and to be looking at all the new tools that have emerged to address that and respond to that."

Hogg has bad news for bitcoin libertarians who are hoping that the blockchain currency might one day render central bank fiat currency obsolete: There is no sign of that happening yet. We asked her if she saw bitcoin as a threat to plain-vanilla money and she replied: "We think about threats to financial monetary stability, and at present we don’t see that."

You can see a video of our discussion following Hogg's speech at Web Summit here.

This is the full text of our conversation:

Jim Edwards: Most people don’t think of the Bank of England as a tech-startup accelerator, so just to be clear, you’re not actually investing in these startups right?

Charlotte Hogg: No

Edwards: Why would any fintech startup want to be involved with the BoE, if they’re not going to sell any equity out of it?

Hogg: They get a number of things from working with us, one is one of their first clients and someone who is willing to publicise that fact, and we’ve certainly found that has been a real attraction for the first set of firms.

Edwards: I see, you’re quite comfortable with the companies within the accelerator advertising the fact that the Bank is one of their clients?

Hogg: They do, yeah.

Edwards: Sometimes fintech startups are not well behaved!

Hogg: We have our ways!

Edwards: And what sorts of things do you offer them, other than "you get to work for the Bank of England"? Are there other specific problems that you’re asking them to solve?

Hogg: Yeah, we pick the problems that we are most interested in solving and we open up to suggestions. When we first opened up we had over 150 firms apply to work on the problems that we identified. So they get to work with our policy teams and our business teams to solve issues that really matter.

Edwards: One of the most interesting statements the Bank made, probably over a year ago now, was that the Bank was interested in bitcoin and blockchain — the sort of distributed-ledger aspect — and there are probably some people at this conference who would love to see fiat currency die. I noticed that bitcoin was up 3 or 4% on the morning of the Trump election. What is the bank’s interest in blockchain?

Hogg: We try and be interested in the activities and critical economic functions rather than any particular technology or any particular asset class. A number of my colleagues have made speeches both on the technology itself and on the application of the technology to a central-bank digital currency.

So it continues to be an area of interest, we continue to work on it, and it’s been one we’ve had both research and experience. So we’ve built our own distributed ledger to understand where the challenges and opportunities are.

Edwards: You don’t see it as a threat to the pound?

Hogg: At present we think about threats to financial monetary stability, and at present we don’t see that.

Edwards: A couple of years ago I saw Bank of England Governor Mark Carney at Davos and he was on stage warning of "an Uber-type situation in finance." And I think what he was referring to was the idea that companies would disrupt the finance world, disrupt banking, faster than regulations could keep up with it. Does the Bank have the tools, is it as fast as it needs to be, to keep an eye on fintech?

Hogg: I think Mark stated his position really clearly in June — we don’t want to be the wild west, and we don’t want to strangle innovation at birth. So we need to know what is going on and how it affects what we care about, which is the safety and soundness of banks, protection of insurance holders, and the resilience of the system.

To the degree those things we think are not affected then we won’t act, to the degree we think they are, we will. The accelerator is actually quite a good way of making sure that we have enough knowledge to be able to make that judgement.

Edwards: OK, so resilience is interesting because I think we’ve all seen news stories about individual commercial bank accounts being hacked, and anyone's personal bank account can be hacked. But a few months ago there was news that the central bank of Bangladesh was hacked, and I noticed that one of the companies in your accelerator, BitSight, is focused on security. Are hackers a threat to central banks?

Hogg: Three of the proof-of-concepts actually are related to cybersecurity. So the two new ones we’ve launched very recently as well as BitSight — Anomali and ThreatConnect — are also geared towards cybersecurity. I think whatever kind of institution you are the threat is evolving and it is significant. And so the onus is on every institution to be proactive in their defence and to be looking at all the new tools that have emerged to address that and respond to that.

Edwards: I feel reassured, I feel like you’re on top of it!

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Will bitcoin prices surpass $1,000? They should in the near future, according to several market experts.

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