5 Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day: Americas

Good morning. Stock futures are higher, Nvidia’s relentless rise continues and Treasuries are on the verge of breaking even for the year. He [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Good morning. Stock futures are higher, Nvidia’s relentless rise continues and Treasuries are on the verge of breaking even for the year. Here’s what’s moving markets. — [Sam Unsted]( Want to receive this newsletter in Spanish? [Sign up to get the Five Things: Spanish Edition newsletter](. Futures higher US futures are rising after the Juneteenth holiday meant the market was closed on Wednesday. That’s [tracking gains across European stocks]( on a busy day for central bank decisions and would mean yet further record highs being notched up by the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 if it holds into the regular session. Treasuries are falling slightly and the dollar has edged a touch higher. Relentless Nvidia Atop the stocks set to drive indexes to new records is Nvidia, the chipmaker which earlier this week was minted as the [most valuable company in the world]( as it vaulted the other members of the $3 trillion club, Microsoft and Apple. Its shares are up by another 4% in premarket trading, which would translate to another $130 billion of market value being added. Bloomberg Opinion’s Parmy Olson, however, said Nvidia’s rise masks the need for companies wading into the AI frenzy to [manage expectations carefully](. Treasuries breaking even Though falling today, [US Treasuries are on the brink of breaking even]( in what has been a rollercoaster year for the world’s biggest bond market. A Bloomberg gauge of returns in the market is now only slightly lower for the year, having been down by as much as 3.4% back in April. Investor bets that a cooling in US prices will ultimately convince the Federal Reserve to cut rates sooner and faster than officials have signaled is helping put a lid on yields. Looser grip China has [loosened its grip on the yuan]( by setting the daily reference rate at the weakest since November, a move that comes as the dollar hovers close to a peak for the year. Elsewhere, China’s central bank has provided the clearest sign yet that it’s looking into trading government bonds in the secondary market in order to regulate liquidity levels, a move that would mark the [biggest shift to monetary policy in the country for years](. Coming Up… There are results on the slate from consultant Accenture, grocery chain Kroger and from Olive Garden-owner Darden Restaurants. The economic calendar is relatively quiet and two Fed officials are set to speak with Thomas Barkin and Neel Kashkari. What We’ve Been Reading This is what’s caught our eye over the past 24 hours. - A century-old Japanese bank [sends a warning]( on higher-for-longer. - Water rationing [disrupts life]( in Bogota. - The [world’s most expensive SUV]( is on the way from an EV maker. - OpenAI co-founder new plans for [safe superintelligence](. - A $185 million fortune [built on burritos](. And finally, here's what Joe’s interested in this morning Crypto narratives come and go over time. Sometimes people are excited about gaming. Sometimes people are excited about remittances, or banking the unbanked. Sometimes people are excited about the prospect of building decentralized social networks. At times the excitement is towards the technology itself, and whether a blockchain has advantages over a traditional database, without the need for a tradable token. We could go on and on. But the one thing you can say, for sure, is that so far none of it has panned out. The "use case" is as elusive today as it was five or even 10 years ago. Talking about use case is almost kind of a joke at this point, and it feels silly to even inquire about that earnestly. That being said, something that I've been thinking about is that there's a certain kind of crypto idealism that you don't hear about so much anymore. Five or six years ago, you heard a lot about how crypto could be this new tool for modes of social coordination that had previously been difficult. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) were supposed to be this new kind of corporate form. Less hierarchical. More organic. More voluntary. You used to hear about rethinking democracy with crypto-based voting systems. There was talk about how cryptocurrencies could facilitate Universal Basic Incomes, and there were various projects launched with that in mind. And of course the original idea — which really predates Bitcoin — was to build a kind of peer-to-peer online money that didn't need some kind of intermediate party, like a bank or payments processor. Efforts to build something like Bitcoin [go back literally decades](. Anyway. Even if much of this was fanciful vaporware, it was at least kind of interesting fanciful vaporware. There was some notion (or more cynically, some pretense) of an ideological project. Some of that stuff still exists, but it's just been completely swamped by the gambling component. You never hear about it. Now all you hear about is financialization and memecoins. And memecoins may be with us forever, just as part of the cultural landscape, but at heart it's just a gambling game, where the goal is to get in before other people get in and then sell before other people sell. The crypto world is still suffused with a libertarian ethos, and you hear about it a lot these days, especially as advocates try to make crypto policy a factor in November's Presidential election. But there's been a subtle shift. The old ideology was about building tools that would function regardless of the political regime. In theory it was about building networks that would run anywhere in the world, bringing freedom-of-payment to anyone under any regime. Now though, the rhetoric of freedom is less about building open networks, and more about maintaining the right to gamble, unfettered, on instruments that often look a lot like stocks, without all of the disclosure and other regulations that apply to listed companies. Follow Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on X [@TheStalwart]( [Bloomberg Markets Wrap: The latest on what's moving global markets. Tap to read.]( Follow Us Like getting this newsletter? 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