The Fed can't open shipping lanes by raising rates

Iran strikes drove oil above $93 and crypto sharply lower. Analysts say a Fed rate hike now would be a mistake. XRP ETFs are pulling in money anyway. And the SEC is working on 24-hour U.S. trading. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Wednesday, September 2, 2026   U.S. airstrikes on Iran overnight pushed oil above $93 a barrel, reviving fears that energy-driven inflation could push the Federal Reserve to raise rates at its September 16 meeting — currently priced at a 68% probability on CME FedWatch. Bitcoin is down roughly 2% to near $76,600, ETH and SOL are off more than 3%, and XRP has dropped more than 4%. But a growing cohort of economists argue the Fed would be making a mistake: hiking rates cannot put more oil on the market, and tightening into a supply shock does lasting damage to an economy that doesn’t need it. Bitcoin, for its part, is showing relative resilience — outperforming gold, which is also lower today, while the Ichimoku cloud has flipped bearish on the hourly chart for the first time since mid-August. The Fed decision on September 16 is now the market’s central event. Stay alert. Read today’s full report → Market snapshot As of 8am EST Asset Price 24h BTC $76,608 −1.87% ETH $2,378 −3.27% SOL $97.83 −4.33% XRP $1.32 −4.34% Prices approximate. Visit coindesk.com/price for live data. What matters today Markets   Story 1 of 3 A Fed rate hike now would be a mistake, analysts say, as bitcoin, gold and stocks all fall. Bitcoin has pulled back to near $76,600 (−1.87%), gold is lower, and equities are falling as renewed U.S. airstrikes on Iran pushed oil futures past $93 a barrel — up 9% on the week — and stoked fears that the Federal Reserve will respond to the resulting inflation pressure with a rate hike at its September 16 meeting. The CME FedWatch tool now puts the probability of a 25-basis-point hike at 68%. A growing group of economists argues that the market is drawing the wrong conclusion. The oil price rise is an energy supply shock caused by a geopolitical conflict, not a sign of an overheating economy. WTI crude climbed from $70 at the start of July to above $90 on supply disruptions tied to the Iran conflict. James Thorne, chief market strategist at Wellington-Altus, argued on X that monetary policy should not mechanically react to a jump in headline inflation driven by an oil shock — describing it as “a growth shock dressed up as inflation” and calling a rate hike “policy error masquerading as prudence.” Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi made the same case in a July CNN interview: “Monetary policy 101 says when there is a supply shock, don’t respond.” The argument matters because higher rates cannot open shipping lanes or add oil to the market — but they can tighten credit, slow the economy and amplify the damage of the original supply shock. Bitcoin’s relative performance this morning is notable: it has held up better than gold and significantly better than Ethereum (−3.27%), Solana (−4.33%) and XRP (−4.34%). BTC’s Ichimoku cloud has flipped bearish on the hourly chart for the first time since mid-August. Liz Truss, the former UK Prime Minister who triggered a bond crisis in 2022 with sudden fiscal expansion, has warned that the global bond rout could force emergency spending cuts in the UK. The Sept. 16 Fed decision now anchors the entire market’s direction of travel. Read more → Policy   Story 2 of 3 The SEC just proposed a blockchain-era transfer agent rule and is planning for 24-hour U.S. stock trading. The SEC issued two significant announcements Tuesday evening that together sketch the direction of travel for market structure under Chairman Paul Atkins. The first was a proposed rule to modernize the regulations governing transfer agents — firms that track the changing ownership of securities — to explicitly incorporate blockchain technology. Transfer agents have always been the plumbing of securities markets, maintaining records of who owns what. The rise of onchain transactions, which settle instantly and transparently on a public ledger, has put the traditional model under pressure. The proposed rule would allow blockchains to serve as official records of securities ownership and transactions — a significant step toward legitimizing tokenized securities at the regulatory level. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce flagged a question that is central to crypto’s interest in the rule: whether holders should continue to be required to provide physical addresses to transfer agents, or whether digital wallet addresses should suffice instead. The rule is open for 60-day public comment. Separately, the SEC confirmed the agenda for its September 17 roundtable on 24-hour trading. The panel will include NYSE, Nasdaq, State Street, Citadel Securities, Cboe, DTCC and Robinhood, among others. The crypto industry already operates around the clock; if U.S. equities move in the same direction, crypto broker-dealers may face new surveillance requirements and compliance obligations that emerge from the SEC’s process. The session will examine overnight surveillance, closing-price practices, trade clearing and settlement mechanics for a continuous system. Bullish, parent company of CoinDesk, recently acquired transfer agent Equiniti for $4.2 billion — a deal that takes on additional context given the SEC’s proposed rule modernizing the very role Equiniti performs. Read more → Markets   Story 3 of 3 XRP ETFs have attracted $170 million over 11 straight sessions. Goldman Sachs tops the institutional holder list. U.S. spot XRP exchange-traded funds have recorded positive inflows for eleven consecutive trading sessions, pulling in a combined $170 million during the streak and lifting cumulative net inflows since their November launch to approximately $1.68 billion, according to SoSoValue data. Tuesday’s contribution was $14.38 million, led by Franklin Templeton’s XRP fund at $6.63 million and Grayscale at $4.72 million. The streak has persisted through a volatile stretch: XRP traded around $1.32 Wednesday morning, down from roughly $1.45 at its late-August peak but still well above the $1 level it was trading near in mid-August before the rally began. Q2 13F regulatory filings, which disclose U.S.-listed fund positions held as of June 30, show Goldman Sachs as the largest disclosed institutional holder of XRP ETFs with approximately $87.4 million in exposure, according to Bloomberg Intelligence data. Jane Street followed with $16.6 million and Millennium Management with $16.2 million. The nature of those holdings matters: Goldman’s position likely reflects market-making activity, facilitation of client orders from wealth management accounts and basis trading rather than a unified directional bet on XRP — a nuance CoinDesk made the same distinction about with Goldman’s bitcoin ETF holdings in 2025. Investment advisers were by far the largest category of reported XRP ETF holders, accounting for about $120 million of the $183 million disclosed, with their holdings rising around $90 million during the quarter. For context on scale: U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $2.26 billion over just six late-August sessions — more than XRP ETFs have collected since launching. CME’s share of XRP futures has also been growing: outstanding XRP futures positions outside CME fell by more than 500 million tokens over the past two weeks while CME exposure climbed about 36% as XRP rallied toward $1.40 — a structural shift toward regulated, institutional-grade market access for the token. Read more → CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. Crypto Daybook Americas: A newsletter from CoinDesk Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.  Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences

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What the U.S.-Japan rate standoff reveals about bitcoin

The U.S. is trying to influence Japan's interest rates. Bitcoin doesn't have that problem. OpenAI just got the TIME cover treatment. And Strategy spent $635M to prop up a preferred stock that still won't cooperate. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Tuesday, September 1, 2026   Bitcoin is consolidating near $78,000 on the first day of September, historically the weakest month of the year for crypto. The macro backdrop has turned more complicated: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has reportedly encouraged Japan to raise interest rates to prop up the yen — the kind of geopolitical pressure on monetary policy that bitcoin structurally cannot be subjected to. If Japan does raise rates and the yen surges, cheap yen-funded positions in risk assets including crypto could unwind fast, as they did in August 2024. Meanwhile global bond yields are rising again, oil is higher and stocks are sliding. Elsewhere: TIME magazine has put OpenAI’s founders on its cover, prompting a decades-old contrarian warning from market historians. And Strategy spent $635 million buying back its own preferred stock — and it’s still trading below par. Stay alert. Read today’s full report → Market snapshot As of 8am EST Asset Price 24h BTC $78,024 +0.14% ETH $2,457 +0.22% SOL $102.20 −0.55% XRP $1.38 +1.33% Prices approximate. Visit coindesk.com/price for live data. What matters today Markets   Story 1 of 3 The U.S. is trying to influence Japan’s monetary policy. It couldn’t do that with bitcoin. NHK reported Tuesday that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent encouraged Japan to raise interest rates to stem the yen’s decline — a top official in the world’s largest economy directly lobbying another sovereign nation’s monetary authority. It is the kind of institutional friction that bitcoin’s design deliberately prevents. Bitcoin’s monetary policy is encoded in its protocol: new supply is issued on a fixed, transparent schedule, and roughly every four years the rate of new issuance is cut in half. No government, no treasury secretary and no phone call from Asheville can change that. That structural argument — that bitcoin is better money because its rules cannot be subject to political pressure — is looking more vivid this week. The practical risk, however, runs in the other direction. If Japan does raise rates in response to U.S. pressure and the yen strengthens sharply, the unwinding of yen-funded carry trades could trigger a wave of forced selling across risk assets, including crypto. This is precisely what happened in early August 2024: a Bank of Japan rate increase drove the yen higher and sparked a global risk-off move that dragged bitcoin down nearly 20% in a matter of days. Beyond Japan, the Tuesday morning macro picture is broadly risk-off. Global bond yields are rising again, with Japan’s 10-year yield climbing toward multi-decade highs. Brent crude gained 2% to $92.35 per barrel after fresh Middle East tensions. World stocks fell broadly. Bitcoin is holding above $77,000, but altcoins are under more pressure — Arbitrum is the notable exception, surging 30% after Robinhood announced it is building its new layer-2 chain on Arbitrum’s technology. Lazarus Group, North Korea’s state-linked hacking operation, has moved more than $30 million in bitcoin through Hyperliquid over the past three weeks. The London Stock Exchange and Payward (Kraken’s operator) announced a partnership to bring the U.K.’s largest stocks onchain via Kraken’s xStocks tokenized equities framework. Read more → Markets   Story 2 of 3 OpenAI’s founders are on the cover of TIME. A decades-old contrarian indicator just lit up. TIME’s September 7 issue features OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on the cover beneath the headline “Trust Us” — and in contrarian investing circles, it has triggered immediate reference to what forecaster Paul Macrae Montgomery called the Magazine Cover Indicator. The premise: when a general-interest magazine puts an investment theme on its cover, the idea has typically already become overbought in both financial and societal terms. Montgomery set three conditions for the signal to be meaningful — the publication must be mainstream rather than a trade title, the theme must be widely understood, and there must already have been a significant price run-up. TIME’s OpenAI cover checks all three. AI has attracted billions of dollars in venture capital, capex and public market enthusiasm since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and the theme has been front-page news globally. The historical track record of the indicator is worth reviewing. TIME named Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Person of the Year in December 1999, months before the dot-com crash. A “Home $weet Home” cover ran in June 2005, ahead of the subprime collapse. Elon Musk received Person of the Year in December 2021, shortly before Tesla shares fell sharply through 2022. The caveat is real: the indicator has significant misses. Apple has appeared on magazine covers multiple times without marking a top, and Montgomery’s rule was designed to apply to a sector-wide theme, not one company. OpenAI is not publicly traded. And TIME’s actual story is far from a victory lap: it reports that an unreleased OpenAI agent escaped a sandboxed test environment and hacked into systems at Hugging Face, and that the company has lost multiple safety leaders who criticized its commercial direction. For investors who have ridden the AI trade through bitcoin miners, infrastructure stocks and high-beta tech, the question is not whether the indicator is reliable — it is not perfectly so — but whether this is the kind of moment that calls for a review of position sizing. Bitcoin’s own bull run since ChatGPT launched has been substantial; both bottomed in late 2022 and both have delivered large returns since. Read more → Finance   Story 3 of 3 Strategy spent $635 million propping up its preferred stock. It’s still below par. Strategy has now spent $635.2 million repurchasing its perpetual preferred stock STRC under a $1 billion buyback authorization — and the effort has not been enough to push STRC to its $100 par value. The share currently trades around $97.34. The buybacks have helped lift STRC from a low near $71, which is a meaningful recovery, but the persistence of the discount to par is telling. Its latest repurchase totaled $151.8 million at an average price of $97.48. A competing product from Strive Asset Management appears to be one of the reasons STRC is struggling. Strive’s SATA preferred stock offers a 13% annualized dividend rate with daily payments, compared to STRC’s 12% rate paid semi-monthly. SATA has held near its $100 par value for more than a week, allowing Strive to continue issuing additional shares through its at-the-market program and use the proceeds to buy bitcoin — it acquired 1,800 BTC in the past week. The gap in investor preference between the two is also visible in the common shares: Strive’s ASST has gained 60% year to date while Strategy’s MSTR has fallen 15%. Strategy did resume buying bitcoin directly last week, acquiring 4,603 BTC for $369.7 million at around $80,000 — its first purchase in two months. That brings its total holdings to 845,050 BTC, valued at approximately $65.9 billion. The parallel between Strategy’s $635 million buyback effort and its continued failure to close the discount is instructive. When a company has to spend this much capital to keep its preferred stock near par, it reflects something the market is telling it: that STRC’s terms are less attractive than the competition, and that the overhang of dilutive share issuance from STRC at depressed prices continues to weigh on perception of the broader capital structure. Read more → CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. Crypto Daybook Americas: A newsletter from CoinDesk Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.  Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences