| Biden's next big plan, Fed decision, and more tech earnings. Family planning President Joe Biden will unveil on Wednesday a sweeping $1.8 trillion "American Families Plan" in his first address to a joint session of Congress today. The legislative proposal includes $1 trillion in spending and $800 million in tax cuts and credits for middle- and lower-income families. The 10-year plan would be part funded by tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans. Private equity's coveted "carried interest" tax break is among the targets in the reform of the tax code. Patience The Federal Reserve is expected to leave its aggressive monetary easing policies in place at today's decision, even as the pace of vaccinations in the U.S. quickens. The statement will be released at 2:00 p.m. with Chair Jerome Powell holding a press conference 30 minutes later. There are no forecast updates published today. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg see the bank trimming its asset purchases before the end of the year, while DoubleLine Capital LP's Jeffrey Gundlach is wondering why the Fed thinks inflation will be transitory. Earnings Apple Inc.'s earnings today will be watched for any fallout from the global chip shortage and iPhone sales numbers in China. For Facebook Inc. the focus will be on advertising revenue. Yesterday's results from Google parent Alphabet Inc. gave some hint as to how strong digital marketing is at the moment. Already this morning Deutsche Bank AG raised its outlook as it reported the strongest quarter in seven years. Markets mixedBiden's latest spending plan, the Fed decision and a raft of earnings means there's a lot for investors to digest. For the moment, they're sitting on their hands. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index was broadly unchanged while Japan's Topix index closed 0.3% higher. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index was little changed at 5:50 a.m. S&P 500 futures were similarly uncommitted to any large moves, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.647%, oil was a little higher and gold slipped. Coming up... U.S. advance goods trade balance for March as well as wholesale and retail inventories data are at 8:30 a.m. The U.S. oil inventory report is at 10:30 a.m. Biden's address to Congress is at 9:00 p.m. As well as the tech giants, Boeing Co., Ford Motor Co., Norfolk Southern Corp., Moody's Corp. and Stanley Black & Decker Inc. are among the many companies reporting today. What we've been readingHere's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours. And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morningWhat if someone offered you the chance to get in early on the next Bernie Madoff? On the one hand, it's a Ponzi scheme, and you could lose all your money. But on the other hand, if you knew in advance that it was a Ponzi scheme (which is implied if someone is pitching you the 'next Madoff') then you could theoretically get huge outsize returns provided you got out in time and sold before everyone ran for the exits. Such a dynamic may be playing out right now in the cryptocurrency market. Now bear in mind I'm not going to make the standard argument that Bitcoin and Ethereum and others are Ponzi schemes. Those are well-tread and other people can make that point. No, I'm talking about a dynamic that's playing out on the far-flung frontiers of the crypto-universe.
A recent post on the site Rekt.news on so-called sh**coins explains how a new breed of coin is being created in minutes -- with minimal codework or technical development or even ostensible purpose -- slapped with an absurd name (many of which are vulgar and not safe for work) and then pumped by TikTok influencers, rapidly turning into multi-million dollar projects. As they explain: "Meme coin investors are making millions from coins that serve no purpose."
Now of course, there's always been thousands of coins out there and the crypto industry has been riven with insider games and pump and dump schemes since almost the beginning. But there's a new dynamic at play that makes the coin market different today than it was in 2017 when the ICO market went nuts. Back then if you made a new coin, you might still have had a hard time getting it listed on an exchange, so that you could sell it for actual money. You almost certainly couldn't get it listed on Coinbase, and if you wanted to get it on a big exchange like Binance, the listing fee was probably prohibitive for all but the most serious projects.
Fast-forward to the present today, and we've seen the rise of so-called Decentralized Exchanges like Uniswap, SushiSwap, and PancakeSwap, where all the transactions happen on a blockchain itself, with other cryptocurrencies serving as the base currency for the transaction. There's no gatekeeper. No listing fee or anything like that. You can watch a video here for example about how to get a coin listed on PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange built upon the Binance Smart Chain.
Anyway, the point is, in the world of decentralized exchanges, it's trivially simple for someone sufficiently motivated to take three steps: 1. Create a new coin. 2. Get it listed on an exchange. And then 3. Use your network of social media influencers to start pumping it to their followers. And if you have coins, and you flog it sufficiently well, then the price might go up. And then maybe you can sell it for more. And then someone will be left holding the bag and lose a bunch of money.
Now I mentioned the Madoff thing in the beginning, and of course there are two complications if your plan is to get in on the ground floor of a Ponzi scheme. One is that in the case of an actual Ponzi, once it goes bust and is the subject of a criminal investigation, you might get clawed back like the Madoff "winners" did. But in the crypto world, that's not a thing. The other issue is ethics.
As JP Koning has pointed out, the one nice thing about all cryptocurrencies -- whether you believe in their durable value or not -- is that there is a certain honesty about what they are. He calls Bitcoin, for example, the world's first "honest & fungible chain letter." Everyone can see the code. Everyone can see how it works. Some might look and think it's a fraud. Others might look and think they're looking at the next world reserve currency. But the point is regardless, that it's not like, say, Madoff, where most people only discovered how it actually worked at the very end (when the money was gone). And so in this new world of decentralized exchanges without significant listing hurdles, we can have a market where everyone knows the whole thing is a joke with no future and no point. But rather than that being a turnoff, traders may actively be seeking out the "next Madoff" (i.e. a pump and dump/Ponzi/greater fool game that lasts for a long time) delivering handsome returns to the people who got in early and got out while the music still played. Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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