Heard on the Street Monday Recap: Tremendous Pushback
The WSJ Dollar Index weakened. The Taiwanese dollar, as of Monday, had appreciated nearly 10% in recent trading sessions. The move is potentially a preview of a world in which there is a long-term weakening of the greenback due to the global trade war, Heard on the Street's Telis Demos and Aaron Back say.
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Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Bitopro Confirms $11M Hack, Taiwan Crypto Exchange Says It Has Replenished Lost Funds
Taiwan-based crypto exchange BitoPro has confirmed to CoinDesk that it suffered a cyberattack on an old hot wallet in May, resulting in losses of over $11 million. The company said it immediately replenished the stolen funds and moved assets to new wallets to prevent further losses. The breach, which occurred on May 8 during a wallet system upgrade, was first flagged by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT. He revealed that the stolen funds were laundered through decentralized exchanges and privacy protocols before being deposited into Wasabi Wallet, a popular Bitcoin mixer. 'BitoPro recently experienced a cyberattack on an old hot wallet during a wallet system upgrade,' the exchange shared with CoinDesk. 'Upon detection, we quickly launched an emergency response, securing assets by moving them to new wallets and blocking the attacker.' The company emphasized that user assets were unaffected, with all deposits, withdrawals, and trading functions continuing as normal. 'BitoPro's virtual asset reserves are ample, and user assets remain completely unaffected,' a spokesperson added. The exchange said it is working with a third-party cybersecurity firm to investigate the hack and will soon publish new hot wallet addresses to improve transparency. It added that the majority of its assets are held in offline cold wallets to protect against similar incidents in the future. BitoPro, which is operated by BitoGroup, has served Taiwan's crypto market since 2018. It supports major cryptocurrencies paired with the Taiwanese dollar and processed over $20 million in trading volume in the past 24 hours, according to while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Has L.A. reached peak cream top? New coffee shop rules could change your go-to order
Luscious, fluffy and often garnished with cocoa powder or a few carefully placed coffee beans, the cream top has become L.A.'s favorite coffee add-on. Sometimes called sweet cream or just whipped cream, the topping has become a staple in third wave L.A. coffee culture and beyond, with local shops taking cues from global companies like Starbucks that have capitalized on customizable drinks for decades. But in the last month, two of L.A.'s best coffee shops have called it quits on sweet cream add-ons. In April, Korean coffee roaster Maru Coffee, likely the first to bring cream top coffee to L.A.'s artisanal coffee scene, put up small countertop signs announcing that it would no longer offer the garnish starting in May. Chinese coffee shop Mandarin Coffee Stand made a similar announcement on Instagram last week and took optional cream top add-ons off the menu on Sunday. 'Over time, we realized that cream tops — though fun and indulgent — often overpower the very ingredients we and our partners all worked so hard to source, roast, and brew with care,' the Instagram post from Mandarin Coffee Stand read. 'When we serve you a drink, we want it to be something we're genuinely proud of … Not something masked in sugar and cream.' Pasadena native Karla Menendez, a frequent Mandarin Coffee Stand customer, came to the shop on Monday for a cream top drink and was disappointed to learn that the add-on was no longer available. 'When I was in line, I was hoping to get [the cream top], but then I checked the Instagram and I was like, 'Oh it's gone,'' Menendez said. 'I like it with the cream top more, but I understand why they're doing it.' This isn't the first time cream top drinks have graced local cafe menus. Taiwanese chain 85°C Bakery Cafe, a well-known international franchise, has been serving sea salt whipped cream on tea and coffee since 2008, when its first U.S. location opened in Irvine. Little Fluffy Head Cafe, which closed in 2023, was among the first to sell drinks with cheese foam in L.A. when it opened downtown in 2017. The globally popular Heytea, a Chinese chain known for its teas topped with cheese foam — a mix of cream cheese and either milk or cream — opened its first West Coast location in Beverly Hills last year. 'In general, people here in America prefer sweeter drinks,' said Sherry Gao, owner of Mandarin Coffee Stand. 'I think the cream top is just a perfect option for them to have something creamy and sweet at the same time.' One of Mandarin's signature drinks is the Vienna Latte, or an espresso topped with sweet cream. The shop began offering cream tops as a $1 add-on for any drink last year. 'We started offering it as an act of hospitality because we wanted to satisfy [customers],' Gao said. 'It just went a little bit out of control.' Known more commonly as the Einspänner, a new take on the Viennese drink gained widespread popularity around 2016 in South Korea, where cafes began replacing espresso with coffee that already contained milk or cream. Around the same time, Maru co-founder Jacob Park began serving a cream top drink at his newly opened coffee shop in Los Feliz. Maru's signature Creamtop, a long black topped with sweet cream, helped launch a citywide obsession — so much so that the coffee shop even made sweatshirts emblazoned with the term. While Maru will continue to offer its Creamtop coffee, the recent discontinuation of the $3 add-on came as a surprise, with many customers heading to TikTok to weigh in on the change. One user posted a sentimental goodbye to their standard matcha latte cream top order at Maru. Others were harsher in TikTok comment sections, questioning the shop's motives and vowing to never return. Gao, who said that Maru's decision to discontinue cream top add-ons inspired her team to follow suit, finds that the preparation, which entails whipping and sweetening cream, is a relatively easy task — one she doesn't mind giving up in order to redirect the spotlight back on the people and processes involved in each stage of coffee production. 'We make efforts to go to the farms directly, building a relationship with the farmers in Mexico, Guatemala and just recently Japan,' said Maru co-founder Joonmo Kim. 'In some sense, you're not doing justice to the hard work and the process that goes into it when you overpower [it].' The cream tops on both Mandarin and Maru's Einspänner-inspired coffees were designed for specific drinks — not to be added on to other types of coffee, or matcha or chai. 'There are some shops that do cream top really well, and I feel like they put a lot of intention into their cream tops,' Gao said. 'But since we don't really have the time to invest into creating more cream tops that accompany the drink well, we only have that one cream top that we use for the Vienna Latte.' Time will tell whether Angelenos adapt simpler (and less sweet) coffee habits — but for now, these coffee shops remain firm in their decision to keep cream top add-ons off their menus. 'I don't know if it's gonna be a movement,' Gao said. 'But I'm just hoping more coffee shops can stay true to what they're doing.'
Forbes
2 days ago
- Forbes
How Apple Helped Train A Generation Of Chinese Tech Workers
Apple played a role in making China a tech manufacturing powerhouse. During the Mao Zedong era in China, the government took hundreds of thousands of youth from urban areas and sent them to farms and fields as part of Mao's reeducation process. Officials labeled these young people the "sent down" generation and forced them to leave their homes and work in peasant environments. The government denied an entire generation the chance to pursue higher education and earn better wages. (An interesting side note is that the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, was one of those "sent down" but was able to leave and go to college as he got older.) After Mao died, new leadership saw the folly of the Maoist doctrine and led by new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, he and his allies made reforms and gradually led China away from a command economy and Maoist dogma and opened it up to foreign investments and technology. He also introduced its vast labor force to the global market, transforming China into one of the fastest-growing economies. This transformation took place from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. However, Apple eventually played a major role in helping China develop a tech-trained labor force, which allowed China to become even more capable of building a manufacturing infrastructure of trained workers to operate these factories. When I first began traveling to Taiwan and China in the 1980s, China was still considered a closed country. In fact, I could not fly to China directly from Taiwan and would have to go to a neutral country like Korea or Malaysia to travel from Taipei to sites I was to visit near Shenzen, China. However, many Taiwanese manufacturers were already eager to build factories in China even before it opened up. In 1988, when China was still in the early stages of creating special trade zones, I had dinner with one of the top executives of Acer, a prominent, fast-growing PC vendor. Its Taiwan factories were running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Acer and a Taipei-based competitor, Foxconn, who made PCs for HP and others, were also running near capacity and lusted after the chance to build new factories in China. By the mid 1990s, China's new trade zones were fully operational, and the country allowed even Taiwanese manufacturers to enter to help it grow its own manufacturing base. Apple accelerated its manufacturing goals in this environment through its partner, Foxconn. Together, they built a world-class operation and trained well over 1 million Chinese youth to make their products over time. Foxconn built actual campuses around the manufacturing facilities, with dorms, cafeterias, and even specialty convenience stores. What is interesting in this scenario is that these factories offered many youths who were still working in the fields a chance to improve. They were recruited and trained to help build Apple products. Apple provided these youth with a dedicated trade school to help them learn to make tech products, especially iPhones. Not long after one of the first campuses opened, a component supplier invited me to the facility. Although security prevented me from entering the campus, I spoke with several trained workers at an offsite location. They gave me a firsthand account of how authorities had forced them to work on farms and how they were now learning trade skills to improve their lives. They explained that, at best, working in the fields, they could make $20-22 USD a month. Now, working in the factory they were making about $100 USD a week. And their room and board were free. By U.S. standards, this may not look like much, but to them, and given the low costs of Chinese goods, these earnings were a godsend. These two workers said they had money to send back to their families and still have money for snacks, clothes and other items that in the past they could only dream about. Although there was much controversy about these working environments and conditions, these kids were glad to have jobs and earn more money than they could ever earn working in the fields. More importantly, they could see a future that did not include working in the fields again. The policies that Deng Xiaoping and his allies implemented after Mao—opening China to foreign investment and technology—played the most crucial role in transforming the country into the world's leading manufacturer of all kinds of goods. But its clear that Apple played a role as well, by creating a trade school-like tech education that helped China build up a workforce capable of managing and working in the thousands of factories in the land of the Red Dragon. Disclosure: Apple and HP subscribe to Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high tech companies around the world.
