News on Macro Economic Data
The government announced employment numbers that were significantly greater than expected at 336,000. However, there may be signs of issues behind the numbers, as a significant number of the jobs are lower-paying, part-time jobs, and the growth rate in public sector jobs outpaces private sector jobs. Additionally, over the last 3 months, full-time employment has decreased by 692K jobs.
Higher interest rates and bond yields continue to create cautionary activity in both equity and credit markets. With most economists suggesting that Fed rate increases take 12-18 months to work their way through the economy, the majority of rate hikes have yet to have an impact.
Crypto Public Company Activity
The big news this past week was that multiple ether (ETH) futures ETFs went public on Monday. These long-awaited ETFs were expected to generate much attention but showed very limited activity. Monday volumes were only roughly $6.6M, and the low activity rate remained throughout the week. One of the reasons provided for the cool reception by investors is the availability of risk-free Treasuries yielding around 5.5%. However, weak sentiment towards crypto remains, and was also probably a contributing factor. With Q4 being a time that fund managers rebalance portfolios heading into the new year, it will be interesting to see the flow of institutional investment into crypto ETFs.
In 2021 Visa announced they would be partnering with 75 of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges to facilitate payment rails for customers to purchase everyday items using Visa cards issued by those exchanges. Visa’s activities to encourage crypto-fiat transactions have resulted in Visa announcing this week that they have facilitated $3B in payment volume since 2021.
Architect Partners published our Q3 2023 Crypto M&A and Financings report which can be found here: Q3 2023 Crypto M&A and Financing Report – Architect Partners
