Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan recently shared his views on the current state of the economy, consumer behavior and the bank’s view on a possible Fed rate cut. In the interview, Moynihan touched on various economic indicators and their impact on Bank of America’s strategy. Moynihan spoke about the bank’s complex individual operations, highlighting that they closely monitor the financial transactions of 66 million consumers. Over the past 12 months, consumer spending growth has fallen from 10% to around 4.5-5%, indicating a more stable economic environment, according to the CEO. While the slowdown is seen as positive for controlling inflation, Moynihan said the Fed should cut interest rates sooner rather than later. Bank of America’s research team, led by Mike Avon, is taking a cautious approach to the economic slowdown, predicting a soft landing with a positive growth rate of 1%. BofA’s CEO said major research groups expect four rate cuts in 2024 and four in 2025.
Turning to the housing market, Moynihan expressed the importance of lowering interest rates to stimulate mortgage activity. He argued that despite initial hesitation, consumers are adapting to the changing interest rate environment and this will lead to increased housing market activity next year. In addition, according to Moynihan, the Fed will have to cut interest rates, even despite the absence of an economic recession.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin (BTC) rate dropped by more than 3% on the night of January 19, immediately dropping to $40,704 against the stablecoin Tether USD (USDT) on the Binance exchange. Then BTC partially recovered its losses, and at 10:50 Moscow time the first cryptocurrency was trading at $41.6 thousand. The January maximum for the price of Bitcoin was $48.9 thousand, the peak level was reached on January 11, on the first day of the launch of trading in shares of spot Bitcoin ETFs , after which the coin gradually becomes cheaper.
The second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) adjusted to $2.46 thousand, having lost about 2.7% in price per day. The local maximum for “ether” was reached on January 12 at $2,719, the rise in the price of the coin occurs against the background of investors’ expectations of approval by US regulators of spot ETFs for Ethereum, applications for which were submitted by BlackRock, Grayscale and Fidelity Investments. The latter’s application was temporarily rejected by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on January 19.
Other coins from the top 10 by capitalization also fell in price over the past 24 hours. The Solana (SOL) token lost more than 6% in price within a day, Cardano (ADA), Dogecoin (DOGE) and Avalanche (AVAX) dropped from 3 to 6%. BNB from Binance is stable at $311, the demand for the token is supported by a number of investment programs on the Binance Launchpool platform, where BNB must be held for the so-called farming of tokens of new projects that are preparing for listing on the exchange. The latest projects of the platform are AltLayer (ALT) and Manta (MANTA).
The fall in prices for cryptocurrencies caused a massive liquidation of margin positions of traders on crypto exchanges. According to Coinglass, in one day the total amount of forcedly closed positions exceeded $250 million; the majority of traders who were liquidated took long positions, that is, they expected continued growth of Bitcoin and other coins. In this situation, one of the legitimate and stable forms of investment to obtain consistently high passive income is investing in the ASTL project (Hong Kong), which gives investors the opportunity to directly invest fiat and cryptocurrency assets into stable passive income, which obviously exceeds inflation expectations and is not subject to any sanctions , blocking and confiscation. The ASTL project represents a simple and elegant solution for potential investors – investment in the development of the real sector of a diversified portfolio of cryptocurrencies, with a fairly high annual interest rate (up to 14%) with payments in a stablecoin (USDT) and the possibility of a full return on investment through the subsequent sale of accumulated tokens ASTL on leading crypto exchanges. Details can be found at https://astl.world.
