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• Goldman Sachs says the government shutdown will result in a 0.2% reduction in first-quarter GDP for every week it persists.
• However, it said the negative effect will be reversed in the second quarter, assuming the shutdown ends by then.
• The firm notes that the impact on financial markets will be "very modest."

Expect the government shutdown to slowly drain the US economy, says Goldman Sachs.

Now that the federal government has failed to successfully negotiate a funding bill, first-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) will slip by 0.2 percentage points for each week the shutdown persists, according to Goldman.

But the firm isn't particularly worried about any long-term damage, noting that any economic slowdown will be quickly reversed in the second quarter, assuming the shutdown is over by then. Goldman is also confident that the market's reaction will be muted.

"We expect any negative impact on financial markets from a shutdown to be very modest," Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a client note. "Markets have also tended to react mildly to shutdowns."

Since 1981, the S&P 500 has seen a median move of just -0.9% on the first day of trading after a government shutdown, according to Goldman data. And on the three occasions those stoppages have lasted for a lengthy period, the equity index hasn't declined more than 1.5% during the entire shutdown.

The firm's findings mirror those of Ryan Detrick, a senior market strategist at LPL Financial, who looked at stock performance during shutdowns dating back to 1976 and discovered that the S&P 500 has been largely unchanged, on a median basis.

And interestingly enough, Goldman says the damage to markets could've been far worse if the government had instead decided on an extension of federal spending authority. That would've increased the odds that the funding deadline winds up interacting with the debt limit, which Goldman says will need to be raised in March.

"Unlike government shutdowns, which financial markets tend to shrug off, markets could have a stronger negative reaction if the upcoming debt limit increase became entangled in the current set of issues," said Hatzius.

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The post Korbit: Non-Koreans Prohibited from KRW Deposits at All Domestic Cryptocurrency Exchanges appeared first on CCN

Korbit, the third largest bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange in the South Korean market behind Bithumb and Coinone, has announced that non-Korean nationals or foreigners will not be allowed to deposit Korean won at any domestic cryptocurrency exchanges. Foreigners Prohibited From Trading Cryptocurrencies by End of January In a message sent to its clients, Korbit stated:

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The post Greg Maxwell Resigns from Blockstream to Focus on ‘Deep Protocol Work’ appeared first on CCN

Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell has resigned from blockchain startup Blockstream to focus his efforts on open-source protocol development. Maxwell made this announcement in an email distributed to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, adding that he had submitted his resignation in November but had only just wound down his involvement with the company. “In order to

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The post More Retail Investors Coming? Bitcoin Investment Trust Sees 91-to-1 Stock Split appeared first on CCN

Bitcoin has been gaining a lot of attention in recent months as a new asset class. Study after study has shown that millennials prefer Bitcoin to traditional asset classes. All this attention, combined with a market capitalization in the hundreds of billions has left Wall Street licking their wounds as more money flows from commission-generating

The post More Retail Investors Coming? Bitcoin Investment Trust Sees 91-to-1 Stock Split appeared first on CCN

The post Bitcoin Price Gains 10% as Cryptocurrency Market Continues to Recover appeared first on CCN

The bitcoin price has increased by more than 10 percent over the past 24 hours, as the majority of cryptocurrencies in the global market have recovered from the recent correction. Whales Sell Off Previously, CCN reported that the major correction which occurred earlier this week was likely triggered by the sell off of bitcoin by … Continued

The post Bitcoin Price Gains 10% as Cryptocurrency Market Continues to Recover appeared first on CCN

The post ‘Bitcoin Bank’ Denies Policy Change on International Cryptocurrency Wire Transfers appeared first on CCN

Metropolitan Commercial Bank denied reports that it has altered its policies to halt international cryptocurrency-related wire transfers. In a statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday, the bank’s parent company responded to what it deemed “erroneous statements” regarding its policies on international wire transfers. Earlier this week, Fortune had reported

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It isn’t possible to have decentralization, a fixed money supply and sufficient liquidity for an efficient payments system, says Frances Coppola.

Organizers hope a new competition will spur security advances for Lightning, but also steer bitcoin debates in more constructive directions.

• We asked venture capitalists what startups they wish they could fund. 
• Many had an interest in finding companies that could tackle neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, though not much has caught their eyes so far. 
• "The problem is we don't know enough about how the disease works to really invest in one drug or another," Alexis Borisy, a partner at Third Rock Ventures told Business Insider.
• VCs are also interested in finding ways to treat cancer that come with fewer side effects, as well as more targeted forms of cancer immunotherapy. 

On a recent trip to San Francisco, we asked venture capitalists what biotech startups they wish they could fund.

Overwhelmingly, the response had to do with degenerative brain conditions, especially treatments for Alzheimer's. 

"I would love to see a technology where you could really tackle Alzheimer's," Tom Heyman, president of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JJDC told Business Insider. Heyman's inspired by the progress that's gone on when it comes to treating cancer. "When I talk to people I tell them, by 2030, I believe that most cancers will be chronic diseases. Alzheimer’s, we’re nowhere, just nowhere."  

Carol Gallagher, a partner at New Enterprise Associates agreed, but expanded her interest to neurodegenerative diseases as a whole, including Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease.

"I think that is the next frontier that we are trying to understand, but I think that it is a really tough area," Gallagher said.

One of the challenging things is that there's a lot we don't know about how the brain works, including what causes Alzheimer's. Until we do, it's going to be difficult to find a treatment that works — practically all Alzheimer's drugs fail in clinical trials, and there are only four approved treatments for the condition. 

"The problem is we don't know enough about how the disease works to really invest in one drug or another," Alexis Borisy, a partner at Third Rock Ventures told Business Insider. "We need to have that understanding at a molecular, mechanistic basis."

Fine-tuning cancer treatments

As cancer becomes more of a chronic disease people can live with for years and even decades after being diagnosed, Gallagher said, it'll be important to find treatments with less dangerous side effects. For example, some of the cell therapies that harness the body's immune system to treat cancer can send patients into remission, but the side effects can be deadly. 

"We should all as an industry be keeping an eye on how we keep making therapies less toxic," she said.

Borisy also said his hope is to find companies that will help make immunotherapy-based cancer treatments more precise. Right now, certain immunotherapies work well, but only in a limited percentage of people. Researchers are trying to figure out why some respond and others don't. 

Ideally, Borisy said, we could one day figure out why the treatments aren't working for some and instead give a treatment that the patient might be predisposed to respond to better. 

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• Karen Ward, the chief market strategist for the UK and Europe at JPMorgan's $1.7 trillion asset management arm, says rising inflation is the biggest risk to global markets right now.
• Most forecasters and policymakers see a gradual return of inflation over coming years, but problems could arise if it rises faster than is currently expected.
• Markets are buoyant, but "thoughts will turn towards a much less risk favourable environment quite quickly" if inflation jumps quicker than forecast.

LONDON — As the world's finance ministers and central bank officials meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, there should be just one worry on their mind when it comes to markets – inflation.

According to Karen Ward, a senior strategist at JPMorgan's $1.7 trillion asset management arm, inflation is the biggest risk facing the world's buoyant financial markets in 2018.

Ward — who is the chief market strategist for the UK and Europe at JPMorgan Asset Management — said the return of inflation, which has been dormant around the world in the post-financial crisis years, will pose the biggest challenge to the ongoing recovery of the global economy this year.

"That's an easy one. It's inflation," Ward said when asked what she sees as the biggest challenge to the markets right now. 

In the years since the financial crisis, inflation worldwide — particularly in developed countries — has been stuck, struggling to get off the ground. Price growth in the USA and eurozone has even dropped into negative territory at times.

Most central banks and commentators are of the belief that core inflation is now slowly returning, and will continue to do so gradually over the coming years, allowing them to tighten the incredibly loose monetary policy that has predominated since the crisis by increasing rates and winding down their quantitative easing programmes. 

"The central banks have assumed that inflation will pick up very gradually and will all be very moderate, and therefore that they can exit these extraordinary policies in a very gradual, contained, predictable fashion. That's really what they're trying to achieve at the moment," Ward told BI.

"They've given us this very detailed forward guidance in every region — whether its the Fed telling us what their best guess is for hiking and running off the balance sheet, or the ECB trying to be as predictable as possible [by using a communication strategy designed to telegraph policy changes far in advance of their implementation].

"But all of this is predicated on inflation behaving itself [by rising in a gradual and steady manner]. 

This, Ward says, is where problems could crop up. What happens if inflation returns quicker than expected, she asks.

"The big debate that has existed over the past few years is whether inflation is dead or sleeping. 

"If actually, we find out that inflation was sleeping and has woken up with a bit more vigour than we perhaps anticipate, then immediately attention would turn to whether central banks are behind the curve. Will they have to act more dramatically? I think then, thoughts will turn towards a much less risk-favourable environment quite quickly."

Ward's comments came during an interview in which she argued that lagging business investment, caused by the uncertainty over Brexit, will be the biggest challenge for the British economy in 2018.

"One area of weakness in the UK, certainly relative to what we're seeing elsewhere, is on investment. I think clearly the uncertainty with regards to the Brexit negotiations is playing a significant role there," she said.

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• The founder of satellite imagery startup Bird.i spoke to Business Insider about scaling up the company and plans for the future. 
• Corentin Guillo spoke about how satellite imagery analysis can be used to change the way commodity traders work and reduce risks and speculation.
• The company hopes to raise up to £20 million this year in a third funding round.

LONDON — In only eighteen months a small group of data scientists in Glasgow have helped change the way the world's commodity traders worldwide make decisions. 

Scotland-based Bird.i is a satellite imagery startup whose analysis has propelled founder Corentin Guillo into boardrooms with major financial firms and changed the way and speed at which commodity traders work.

"We give people access to new types of information and insight they've never been exposed to before," Guillo told Business Insider. A single image is "almost a postcard," but the potential information that can be drawn from analysing a series images over time is enormous.

Although the idea dates back to 2009, the business started in earnest in May 2016, when Guillo raised £500,000 and put together a team of six. A second £2 million founding round came shortly afterwards, in June 2017, and the team grew to 12 — 10 of whom are data scientists with machine learning backgrounds.

Guillo is now looking to scale up the business and grow a commercial sales team, and hopes to raise between £10-20 million in a third funding round this year.

How it works

Bird.i analyses satellite imagery to provide insights for professionals in the financial services and construction sectors, as well as for curious individuals who want more regularly updated images of the world than Google Maps can provide.

While a single high quality image of the world taken from space can be compelling, the information that can be drawn out of a series is much more detailed.

Bird.i analyses images across a range of commodities, including oil and agriculture, to allow traders to "limit the speculation and make decisions based on fact," says Guillo.

If an oil pipeline bursts, for example, Bird.i's analysts can predict the scale of damage and loss using daily or near-daily images, information which can be handed to traders in real time.

Images of oil refineries are also detailed enough to allow Bird.i to predict how full individual oil tanks are using the shadows cast by tanks' floating roofs: More shadow suggests the roof and oil stores are low.

Factors such as the time the photos were taken, the position of the sun, and the satellite's position are also considered.

These images can be taken in tandem with those of shipping ports, where the number and frequency of boats loading and unloading oil are recorded. Aggregating all this information allows Bird.i to provide traders with estimates of a country's oil production, storage and exports.

For companies signed up to this service, the data they receive is automatically updated every time a new image is analysed by Bird.i's team.

Another popular commodity to track is grain production. Bird.i collects images from grain storage units along the Mississippi river in the US, which are detailed enough to show how many barges at each loading site are collecting and moving grain towards the coast.

This means Bird.i can "predict the volume of grain that will be exported from the US," says Guillo, as well as which companies are moving the most.

'We take all the risk'

Although Bird.i has three main competitors in the space, Guillo says his business model is different and more affordable: Bird.i uses a revenue share model, whereby satellite operators allow the startup to access their images for free (a single image can cost thousands of pounds), and take a revenue cut every time one of their images is used.

"We take all the risk by creating a new market," says Guillo. "If we fail, it's not their money [that is lost], but if we succeed they share our success."

This also grants operators entry to a new market. One operator alone cannot provide regular enough images of a specific location for trends to be analysed; Bird.i aggregates images from numerous suppliers, allowing each operator potentially to reach audiences they otherwise would not have reached.

The concept behind Bird.i was born when Guillo was working in aerospace, aggregating satellite images, he says. He realised there was a huge number of satellites taking images all the time, which were going directly into huge databases that "nobody could access," (bar a few government and commercial organisations).

"I thought, we need to do something with this, it needs to be made available to the mass market."

Scaling up 

Bird.i is unlikely to be profitable until 2020, says Guillo, but he is confident it will continue to grow. Going forward, the firm is looking to develop its work in the financial services and construction sectors, rather branch out into other sectors, such as defence, and compete with other satellite analysis companies. 

The challenge now, says Guillo, is to scale the business and attract more than the "few innovators" who initially understood the value of the company's analysis.

Part of this is educating people about the power of satellite imagery: "it's only when you've found their issue, their pain, that you can twist your pitch and your marketing strategy to address their problem."

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• The collapse of Carillion could be "the first in a series of crises for construction's big players," according to leading consultant Mark Farmer.
• Farmer told Business Insider that Carillion could be the first of several household names to fall if the industry does not "overhaul itself."
• "The scale and cost of this are yet to be fully grasped," Farmer said.

LONDON — The collapse of Carillion could be "the first in a series of crises for construction's big players," according to leading industry figure Mark Farmer.

"Carillion's exposure and breadth of operation mean that its liquidation will now send ripples through the entire supply chain, potentially affecting tens of thousands of jobs and a gigantic portfolio of active work," Farmer, chief executive of Cast consultancy and author of a government-commissioned 2016 report on the UK construction industry, told Business Insider.

Crisis-hit construction firm Carillion fell into compulsory liquidation on Monday after running up losses on major contracts and battling a £1.5 billion debt pile. It was one of the government's biggest contractors, supplying construction services to flagship infrastructure projects as well as providing services to the NHS, schools, hospitals, and prisons.

The scale and cost of this are yet to be fully grasped

Up to 43,000 jobs, including 19,000 in the UK, are thought to be at risk, and as many as 30,000 small businesses are thought to be owed money by Carillion, according to trade group Build UK, some of which appear likely to collapse.

Construction work at over £1 billion-worth of projects has also been halted since Monday, according to estimates compiled by trade magazine Construction News. Sites affected including an NHS hospital in Liverpool, a £154 million build-to-rent scheme in Manchester, and a £100 million housing redevelopment project in Sunderland.

"The scale and cost of this are yet to be fully grasped," Farmer said.

Carillion might not be the last household name to fall

Farmer's highly critical report on the UK construction industry in 2016 identified shrinking profit margins and financial fragility as two symptoms of a broken industry which needed to "modernise or die," and he warned on Thursday that Carillion's collapse could be the first of several of the industry does not "overhaul itself."

"This unfurling mess is further proof that the current business models and delivery methods used by the construction industry are not fit for purpose," he said.

"Shrinking profit margins, a deteriorating skills base, widescale reluctance to embrace technology and increasing issues surrounding build quality mar the industry.

"The myopic focus on turnover, rather than improving margins and removing waste in the supply chain through efficiency and innovation, has now resulted in the collapse of an industry giant.

If the industry doesn’t take this as an opportunity to overhaul itself and grasp a real modernisation agenda, Carillion won’t be the last household name to fall by the wayside.”

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