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Bitcoin prices keep reaching new all-time highs, buoying the current rally's staying power.

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Cars have come a long way in the past 30 years. When I first started driving, you didn't get much more than an AM/FM radio and maybe tape deck. Airbags hadn't yet become common. Self-driving was called cruise control. Anything that drove "sporty" cam from Europe.

Now safety is extensive, infotainment and navigation are copious, autonomous features are becoming more common and self-driving could soon be a reality, and many vehicles, from 2-doors to pickups, can handle like sports cars.

The antidote to all this progress is the Jeep Wrangler. Jeep has been building this thing since the mid-1980s, and before that, the DNA of this pure offroader ranges all the way back the original Willys military vehicle of World War II. Prior the the Wrangler, Jeep sold the no-nonsense CJ. 

Over the years, the Wrangler has collected a few more creature comforts, but this is still just about the most rudimentary vehicle you can currently buy, purpose-built to leave the pavement and head for the hills, the rocks, the rivers. 

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Jeep's parent, recently let us borrow a 2017 Sahara Wrangler, with a base price of about $30,000, but for our tester, optioned up to almost $38,000.

The idea was that we might get to tackle some gnarly East Coast winter snow. The bad weather, sadly, never arrived. But we did our best to put the Wrangler through its paces, anyway:

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The Wrangler is unmistakably a Jeep, from the stout tires and wheels to the boxy body panels and blocky shape, the flat windshield and hood latches, the aggressive bumpers and un-integrated fenders to ...

... that signature, slotted Jeep grille and the round headlamps. Note the hooks on the front bumper. What we have here is the automobile in basic, near-tactical form: body-on-frame design, a pair of solid axles, and a genuine four-wheel-drive system that's prepared to take on the backwoods.

The consumer version of this famous ride has been in more-or-less continuous production since 1944. 

The allure is obvious. Unlike more versatile SUVs and crossover that claim to have offroad credibility, the Jeep Wrangler makes offroad credibility its defining characteristic. Essentially, you have a relatively powerful and torque-y motor (but not one that that's too large or too powerful) yokes to a 4WD setup that, when applied through four beefy tires, should be able to conquer terrain that would cripple other machines.

How much legit offroading do Wranglers get into? More than you might think (a shielding gas tank comes standard, after all). But there's a contingent of owners who buy the vehicle because it exudes outdoorsiness. What it can do is more important that what it typically does do. 

Our tester came with a "Silver Metallic" paint job, a basic-black interior, two doors, an nearly inaccessible back seat, and a $2,000-extra hardtop that can be disassembled. The doors can also be removed, by the way.

Somewhat hilariously, my first grader kept getting stuck with his backpack trying to squeeze in the back seat. It would have been easier if the weather had been warmer and I'd figured out how to remove to top and the doors.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average blew through the 21,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday as stocks resumed their record-setting rally after a one day breather.

It took just 24 trading days (and 35 calendar days) for the index to reach this latest landmark interval from the prior one of 20,000, which it touched on January 25. 

Notably, this ties for the fastest ascent between landmark intervals. The last time the Dow gained 1,000 points between psychologically important points was back in 1999: it hit 10,000 on March 29, 1999 and then jumped to 11,000 on May 3, 1999.

Shuffling back to the present, stocks climbed following the more measured tone in US President Donald Trump's speech reassured some investors. Bank stocks led the charge as chances of an interest rate hike this month increased.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress late Tuesday, Trump said he wanted to boost the US economy with a "massive" tax relief, make a $1 trillion effort on infrastructure and overhaul Obamacare. However, his comments lacked in detail.

Trump "repeated many of his previous themes, but in a more measured, less combative tone than in previous speeches. However, he did not offer many new details on economic policy," Lewis Alexander, Chief US Economist at Nomura, wrote in a note. "In summary, we did not learn much [on Tuesday] that would influence our economic outlook."

"Broadly speaking, President Trump did not materially resolve key uncertainties regarding the outlook for economic policy — such as the outlook for taxes and spending, infrastructure, trade, and exchange rate policy — in his speech [on Tuesday night]; we believe it will take many months before we have clear answers to all of these issues," he added. 

Let's jump to the scoreboard:

• Dow: 21,148.81, +336.57, (+1.62%)
• S&P 500: 2,399.20, +35.15, (+1.49%)
• Nasdaq: 5,910.27, +84.67, (+1.45%)
• US 10-year yield: 2.456, +0.098
• WTI Crude: $53.77 per barrel, -0.25, (-0.46%)

1. Businesses are expecting inflation to rise in the coming months, Fed's Beige Book says. The Beige Book repeated that the economy continues to expand at a moderate pace, amid promises from the new administration to return the economy to 3% growth. 

2. Personal spending missed, but personal income beat. For the month of January, personal income rose by 0.4% and personal spending came in at 0.2%. Economists had forecast that both personal income and spending would rise by 0.3%.

3. Ray Dalio is stepping down from managing the world's biggest hedge fund firm amid a company-wide shake-up. Dalio will stop managing Bridgewater Associates by mid-April, according to a client note Wednesday reviewed by Business Insider. Dalio said in the note that he had "temporarily stepped back into management" 10 months ago to help transition Greg Jensen's co-CEO role.

4. Traders are making a kill betting against retail. In a note sent out to clients on Tuesday, S3’s head of research, Ihor Dusaniwsky, said that the top five most profitable short trades in multi-line retail so far this year are all traditional brick and mortar retailers who “depended on strong foot traffic and higher margins to support their infrastructure and staff are being forced to find ways to cut costs, increase margins and eliminate underperforming locations.”

5. Treasurys got smashed as sellers pile on after Trump's speech. Selling pushed yields up more than 7 basis points in the intermediate part of the curve with the 10-year back up at a two-week high.

6. Bitcoin climbed to a fresh record high. An aggressive bid has the cryptocurrency up 2.1% at $1,204.43 per coin as traders continue to pile in ahead of the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission ruling on whether or not it will approve at least one of the three proposed bitcoin-focused exchange-traded funds by the March 11 deadline.  

7. The Bank of Canada is in "wait and see" mode. The bank held rates again at 0.50%, as virtually everyone had expected, and wrote in its accompanying statement: "While there have been recent gains in employment, subdued growth in wages and hours worked continue to reflect persistent economic slack in Canada, in contrast to the United States."

ADDITIONALLY:

Traders are sending a warning that the stock market rally is running out of steam.

For a guy who hates regulation, Trump sure is proposing some expensive ones.

McDonald's could kill the drive-thru as we know it.

ISIS just pledged to attack China — here's why.

How the company behind 2 of the year's biggest movies is blowing up the Hollywood playbook.

Here are the 13 US housing markets that would be most affected by rising interest rates.

Wells Fargo isn't giving cash bonuses to 8 senior executives to "promote accountability" after its accounts scandal.

SEE ALSO: Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe

Join the conversation about this story »

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average blew through the 21,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday as stocks resumed their record-setting rally after a one day breather.

It took just 24 trading days (and 35 calendar days) for the index to reach this latest landmark interval from the prior one of 20,000, which it touched on January 25. 

Notably, this ties for the fastest ascent between landmark intervals. The last time the Dow gained 1,000 points between psychologically important points was back in 1999: It hit 10,000 on March 29, 1999 and then jumped to 11,000 on May 3, 1999.

Moving back to the present, stocks climbed after the more measured tone in US President Donald Trump's speech reassured some investors. Bank stocks led the charge as chances of an interest rate hike this month increased.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress late Tuesday, Trump said he wanted to boost the US economy with a "massive" tax relief, make a $1 trillion effort on infrastructure, and overhaul Obamacare. However, his comments lacked in detail.

Trump "repeated many of his previous themes, but in a more measured, less combative tone than in previous speeches. However, he did not offer many new details on economic policy," Lewis Alexander, Chief US Economist at Nomura, wrote in a note. "In summary, we did not learn much [on Tuesday] that would influence our economic outlook."

"Broadly speaking, President Trump did not materially resolve key uncertainties regarding the outlook for economic policy — such as the outlook for taxes and spending, infrastructure, trade, and exchange rate policy — in his speech [on Tuesday night]; we believe it will take many months before we have clear answers to all of these issues," he added. 

Let's jump to the scoreboard:

• Dow: 21,115.55, +303.31, (+1.46%)
• S&P 500: 2,395.96, +32.32, (+1.37%)
• Nasdaq: 5,904.03, +78.59, (+1.35%)
• US 10-year yield: 2.454, +0.096
• WTI Crude: $53.68 per barrel, -0.33, (-0.61%)

1. Businesses are expecting inflation to rise in the coming months, Fed's Beige Book says. The Beige Book repeated that the economy continues to expand at a moderate pace, amid promises from the new administration to return the economy to 3% growth. 

2. Personal spending missed, but personal income beat. For the month of January, personal income rose by 0.4% and personal spending came in at 0.2%. Economists had forecast that both personal income and spending would rise by 0.3%.

3. Ray Dalio is stepping down from managing the world's biggest hedge fund firm amid a company-wide shake-up. Dalio will stop managing Bridgewater Associates by mid-April, according to a client note Wednesday reviewed by Business Insider. Dalio said in the note that he had "temporarily stepped back into management" 10 months ago to help transition Greg Jensen's co-CEO role.

4. Traders are making a killing betting against retail. In a note sent out to clients on Tuesday, S3’s head of research, Ihor Dusaniwsky, said that the top five most profitable short trades in multi-line retail so far this year are all traditional brick and mortar retailers who “depended on strong foot traffic and higher margins to support their infrastructure and staff are being forced to find ways to cut costs, increase margins and eliminate underperforming locations.”

5. Treasurys got smashed as sellers pile on after Trump's speech. Selling pushed yields up more than 7 basis points in the intermediate part of the curve with the 10-year back up at a two-week high.

6. Bitcoin climbed to a fresh record high. An aggressive bid has the cryptocurrency up 2.1% at $1,204.43 per coin as traders continue to pile in ahead of the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission ruling on whether or not it will approve at least one of the three proposed bitcoin-focused exchange-traded funds by the March 11 deadline.  

7. The Bank of Canada is in "wait and see" mode. The bank held rates again at 0.50%, as virtually everyone had expected, and wrote in its accompanying statement: "While there have been recent gains in employment, subdued growth in wages and hours worked continue to reflect persistent economic slack in Canada, in contrast to the United States."

ADDITIONALLY:

Traders are sending a warning that the stock market rally is running out of steam.

For a guy who hates regulation, Trump sure is proposing some expensive ones.

McDonald's could kill the drive-thru as we know it.

ISIS just pledged to attack China — here's why.

How the company behind 2 of the year's biggest movies is blowing up the Hollywood playbook.

Here are the 13 US housing markets that would be most affected by rising interest rates.

Wells Fargo isn't giving cash bonuses to 8 senior executives to "promote accountability" after its accounts scandal.

SEE ALSO: Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe

Join the conversation about this story »

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[…]

The post Bitcoin Price Scales to a New All-Time High at $1,230 appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

[…]

The post Vinny Lingham: 2017 Is Not the Year for a Bitcoin ETF, Fears Ensuing Volatility appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

Bitcoin is in record territory once again. 

An aggressive bid has the cryptocurrency up 2.1% at $1,204.43 per coin as traders continue to pile in ahead of the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission ruling on whether or not it will approve at least one of the three proposed bitcoin-focused exchange-traded funds by the March 11 deadline.  

Wednesday's gain has the cryptocurrency up almost 30% so far in 2017 after it was the top performing currency in each of the past two years. 

Bitcoin has had a crazy start to the year. It rallied more than 20% during the first week of 2017 before tumbling 35% amid concerns China was going to crackdown on trading. Recently, action has managed to shrug off news that China's biggest exchanges were going to start charging clients a flat fee of 0.2% per transaction and that they were going to block withdrawals. 

SEE ALSO: We bought and sold bitcoin — here's how it works

Join the conversation about this story »

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[…]

The post Andreas Antonopoulos: Bitcoin’s Design Can Withstand Quantum Computer Attack appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

A deputy governor for the Reserve Bank of India critiqued digital currencies such as bitcoin in a speech today.

Source

The Indian central bank's deputy governor says blockchain-based virtual currencies won't be killing cash.

The post Bitcoin or Blockchain Eliminating Cash a ‘Pipe Dream”: Senior Indian Central Bank Official appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

President Trump is expected to outline plans for trade policy development in his speech to a joint session of Congress.

He outlined some of those plans in remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he said “We’re going to make trade deals, but we’re going to do one-on-one, one-on-one, and if they misbehave, we terminate the deal.”

The United States had a global current account deficit (the broadest measure of all trade in goods, services and income) of $470 billion (2.5 percent of GDP) and a goods trade deficit of $750 billion (4 percent of GDP) in 2016.

Meanwhile, a handful of countries have developed large, structural trade surpluses that reached $1.2 trillion, which have effectively transferred millions of manufacturing jobs from the United States and other countries to these surplus countries—have hampered economic recovery in much of the globe—and now threaten to destabilize the global economy again in coming years if not reduced. 

Trump was elected, in part, on a promise to “make American manufacturing great again.” Eliminating U.S. trade deficits and rebalancing global trade are the keys to rebuilding U.S. manufacturing, along with a robust plan for massive infrastructure investments, which would also stimulate manufacturing investment and job creation. Achieving these goals will require a laser-like efforts to eliminate the cause of U.S. trade deficits. In doing so, we must avoid doing harm to the U.S. economy and to our international competitiveness, and clearly identify key priorities for developing effective trade and manufacturing strategies. In doing so:

• The last thing we need is to negotiate more trade and investment deals. And we should avoid raising tariffs on Mexico that will just hurt workers in both the United States and Mexico.

• We do need to address the root causes of the $1.2 trillion global trade surplus that has been engineered by countries in Europe and East Asia, led by China, Germany, Japan and Korea. These problems include unfair trade policies, massive excess production capacity in a range of industries and, most importantly, significantly undervalued currencies.

• Global trade surpluses are also generating massive capital inflows that are fueling real estate and asset bubbles that could lead to another round of global financial crises. This is the hidden underbelly of a growing potential Trump-bubble in financial markets that must be addressed before it gets out of control.

Thus, it is doubly important to reduce global trade imbalances in order to rebuild U.S. manufacturing, restore order to the global economy, and eliminate the threat of yet another Great Recession.

The last thing we need is to negotiate more trade deals

Trump has claimed that he can force other countries to give us better terms on trade deals because he is a tough negotiator. During the campaign he said, “I intend to immediately renegotiate … the NAFTA [North American Free Trade] agreement.” If he doesn’t get what he wants, he will withdraw from the deal, he says.

He clearly has a point that our trade deals have been bad for American workers. And these deals have little to nothing to do with “free trade.” Instead, NAFTA and other recent trade and investment deals such as the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) were designed to create a separate, global set of rules to protect foreign investors and encourage the outsourcing of production from the United States to other countries.

These deals contain 30 or more chapters providing special protections for foreign investors; extending patents and copyrights (enriching the wealthy); privatizing markets for public services such as education, health, and public utilities; and “harmonizing” regulations in ways that limit or prevent governments from protecting the public health or environment.

These rules are all enforced by special “investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) panels,” private arbitrators that transfer sovereignty from domestic courts to “independent” international lawyers (who work for multinational corporations [MNCs] one day and decide cases the next—so much for “unbiased” law). These deals do much more than cut tariffs or promote trade.

They promote outsourcing and shift the balance of power from workers to investors based in the United States and other countries.

Trump is also correct that the system for creating such deals is fundamentally corrupt. Government negotiators (trade lawyers who often have their own deregulatory agendas) are, by law, advised by committees composed of hundreds of representatives of multinational corporations who, in essence, dictate the terms of these agreements.

The process is fundamentally flawed. And, many of the negotiators, and leading policy makers, are part of the revolving door conspiracy where they negotiate provisions for their former employers who they often rejoin right after negotiating the sweetheart deals.

But we can’t just wave a wand and undo NAFTA because the United States, Mexico and Canada have 20 years of involvement in the deal and cancelling it would create havoc. NAFTA must be improved by raising labor standards. Mexico has some of the weakest labor laws in the world and labor rights are under attack across the United States, so workers throughout the hemisphere would be helped by a joint agreement to raise labor standards to Canadian levels. In addition, both countries could gain from measures to dramatically increase the required North American content of goods deemed to originate in the region, and by eliminating the investor-state dispute settlement system from the agreement. However, Donald Trump and his billionaires’ cabinet are unlikely to make these kinds of changes to the NAFTA.

Worse yet, slapping tariffs on Mexican imports to pay for Trump’s proposed border wall will not solve any problems for American workers.

Our economy is tightly integrated with that of Mexico and Canada. Any job-creating forced from increased domestic production following the imposition of tariffs on Mexican imports would be strongly muffled by job-displacing effects of higher-priced U.S. goods—including parts used to produce other U.S. goods for export (thereby hurting U.S. exports). Imposing high tariffs suddenly would also harm workers in Mexico, and likely result in a trade war that would only escalate these costs further.

The Republican Party and the business interests it represents have been the chief proponents in the passage of these destructive trade deals. Two-thirds of the votes needed to pass NAFTA in 1993 were provided by Republicans. In fact, NAFTA was Ronald Reagan’s idea, and was first introduced and negotiated by President George H. W. Bush. More recently, 85 percent of Democrats in the House and 70 percent in the Senate opposed giving the president Fast Track authority for the TPP and other trade deals, while 87 percent of Senate Republicans gave final approval to the Fast Track bill.

It was Republicans in Congress who helped these trade deals go forward. And it was Republican leaders who blocked legislation that would have given the Commerce Department tools to tackle the currency manipulation that is behind the loss of jobs to exporting nations that break the rules.

This history makes us suspicious that radical improvements in U.S. trade policy that would benefit working-class Americans will occur under joint Republican control of the Presidency and Congress.

The solutions Trump himself has put forward reflect little understanding of what a smart trade regime would look like. Instead of relying on Wilbur Rossto save us from a corrupt system of trade agreements from which he personally benefitted, we should instead call a halt to the negotiation of all new international trade and investment deals. Meanwhile, instead of vague promises about “better” trade deals, we need a trade policy that forthrightly addresses the fundamental causes of growing trade deficits—deficits that are causing our trade-related job losses and depressing the wages of most working Americans.

We do need to address the root causes of the $1.2 trillion global trade surplus

Countries that engage in unfair trade practices tend to develop sustained, structural trade surpluses with the world as a whole.

China, which has the largest, most persistent goods-trade surpluses in the world, is the leading example. China both subsidizes and dumps (selling below costs) massive quantities of exports.

In addition, it blocks imports, pirates software and technology from foreign producers, invests in massive amounts of excess production capacity in a range of basic industries (investments that lead to dumping), often through state owned enterprises (SOEs), and operates as a refuse lot for carbon and other industrial pollutants.

China has also engaged in extensive and sustained currency manipulation over the past two decades, resulting in persistent currency misalignments.

Roughly twenty countries, most in Asia, have engaged in persistent, sustained currency manipulation, by buying up massive quantities of Treasury bills and other dollar denominated assets (currency intervention), driving up the value of the dollar and driving down the yuan and other currencies.

Currency manipulation acts like a subsidy to the exports of all those countries, and a tax on U.S. exports to the world. Although China has not intervened against the dollar in the past two years, the yuan remains massively undervalued, and misaligned, vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar, as do the currencies of a number of other unfair traders.

Before turning to remedies for unfair trade and currency misalignment it is important to consider how the United States should go about setting trade priorities. The Trump administration has complained frequently about NAFTA and the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico, which reached $63.2 billion in 2016.

While NAFTA is seriously flawed, for reasons noted above, Mexico does not engage in widespread unfair trade practices, as do the other countries noted above. One strong indicator of this is the fact that Mexico had a significant, sustained trade deficit (current account balance) with the world which reached $32.7 billion in 2015 (latest data available), as shown in Figure A, below.

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