Latest news with #financialfirms
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Cardano Drops 3% as Market Sell-Off Persists, Midnight Airdrop Sparks Volatility
Cardano (ADA) fell about 3% in the past 24 hours as part of a continuing crypto market sell-off since the end of last week. It was recenlty trading at $0.72. ADA witnessed substantial volatility during the period, displaying a 3.47% fluctuation from the session low of $0.734 to the high of $0.760, according to CoinDesk Research's technical analysis model. The digital asset rose from $0.745 to as high as $0.760 bolstered by heightened trading activity, before meeting resistance and retreating to $0.735 with volume of 59.03 million. It rebounded to $0.755 before confronting additional selling interest, eventually settling at $0.739, implying that bearish forces may persist as ADA battles to preserve stability above the critical $0.740 threshold. The overall crypto market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, is down about 1.7%, slightly less than ADA. Bitcoin (BTC) is roughly the same percentage lower. Earlier today, Midnight — a privacy-focused blockchain built on Cardano — began distributing its NIGHT token through an airdrop dubbed the Glacier Drop. Wallets tied to XRP addresses received about 2.62 billion tokens, roughly 11% of the total allocation. The remaining tokens are earmarked for holders of ether (ETH), sol (SOL), Binance coin (BNB), Avalanche's AVAX (AVAX), and basic attention token (BAT). In a recent interview, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said the Midnight project has drawn interest from major financial firms. 'We've met with all the big guys,' he said, claiming that some were intrigued by the potential for anonymous crypto trading on the platform. Separately, Cardano's core development group, Input Output Global (IOG), received approval on Monday for a $71 million treasury proposal to fund 12 months of upgrades to the Cardano network. The on-chain vote drew scrutiny from some community members who raised concerns about transparency and how the funds will be spent. Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk's full AI Policy. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Forbes
30-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Failures Of Economic Forecasting (Newly Exposed By The ‘Tariff Whiplash')
Executive Summary It turns out that professional economists' forecasts are useless – as forecasts. They do not provide accurate predictions about the future direction of the economy. They are too volatile to function as reliable economic or financial signals for businesses or investors. And while by definition a forecast should serve as a leading indicator, today's prominent forecasts appear – perversely – to be lagging indicators that only belatedly catch up with events. They are especially poor at predicting the crucial turning points in the business cycle, such as the onset of a Recession. This is not a new diagnosis. There is today a hapless nihilism among policy-makers who have been burned too often by forecasts that didn't pan out. These flaws were clearly exposed by the whiplash in expert sentiment set off by the 'tariff shock' this spring. A burst of negative forecasts in April and May produced a sudden wave of economic defeatism that surged through the markets and the business community, and alarmed the public. Those forecasts turned out to be completely off-base. It was misinformation, or 'fake news' in today's jargon. Even the most prestigious forecasting sources were implicated. Examples discussed in this column include the long-running surveys of professional economists by The Wall Street Journal and by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, as well as models used by the New York Federal Reserve and several major financial firms – all of which exhibit these shortcomings. Those false warnings from the spring have now been rescinded. But the credibility of the 'experts' has been compromised, again. It is time for a thorough reassessment of the value of traditional macroeconomic forecasts to serve as anything more than grist for what turn out to be essentially meaningless media headlines. The Ebb and Flow of Recession Fears It's summertime, and apparently also the season for revising, retracting or reversing all the economic forecasts published last spring – particularly as to the question of whether the U.S. is headed towards a Recession. In April, almost every forecast called for one, and soon. Now the backtracking has begun (e.g, JP Morgan, shown above). It is the second abrupt shift in professional opinion this year. The 'expert consensus' in the U.S. has lurched from complacency to panic and back again in 180 days. At the beginng of the year, U.S. economic prospects looked positive. The tariff storm that started in March climaxed on April 2 ('Liberation Day') caused an abrupt psychological inversion among professional economists. 50 of 52 respondents to the Wall Street Journal survey jacked up their estimates for 'the likelihood of a recession in the next 12 months' to an average of 45%. Except for the pandemic-shock in Q2 of 2020, it was the largest quarterly increase in pessimism in the history of the survey. The big banks were even more dire. Goldman hiked the risk level to 65%. JP Morgan's headline forecast jumped to 60%, but some internal models showed higher levels. Torsten Sløk's revised outlook was extreme: 'There is now a 90% chance of what can be called a Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.' Still it wasn't long before the experts recovered their 'animal spirits' and the recession-prediction weathervane flipped around once again. By July, 45 of 52 WSJ-polled economists had reversed themselves and now saw a much reduced probability of a recession. (Six forecasts were essentially unchanged; only one increased.) It was the largest quarterly improvement in professional sentiment in the history of the survey (except for the post-Pandemic rebound in 2020). JP Morgan was tentative, adjusting their official recession forecast to 'below 50%' – perhaps 40%– which sounds more like equivocation than prediction. But in plain English they were clear enough: 'We no longer see a U.S. recession.' Goldman downgraded its recession forecast to 30%. Sløk cut his estimate to 25% – which meant, he said, that 'we do not expect a recession.' This pendulum swing is extraordinary – all the more so because it was not a shift in the supposedly fickle view of the general public, but a consensus of leading experts built on the best available information and the most sophisticated macroeconomic models, and offered up as a bankable prediction to investors, business clients, and Sentiment Indicators Followed Along Broader measures of sentiment showed the same fluctuation. Betting odds on prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi mirrored the cycles of professional forecasts. Businesses' mentions of the R-word in reports and earnings calls jumped in April and May –and then almost disappeared. These trended the same Happened? The wave of pessimism that swept through the broader public and business community in April and early May was not driven by economic realities. Stock market turmoil in early April was a prime mover, and it proved transitory. By May, market volatility was down and prices were up. By June, the S&P was setting new record highs. But the abrupt shifts in the published forecasts helped intensify the swings, and misled many. The public response was an echo of economists' sudden pessimism, boosted by alarmist punditry of the usual sort, for which Larry Summers may serve as the type specimen. Right after Liberation Day, Summers declared to Bloomberg Such media pronouncements from prominent economic experts alarmed the public, and amplified the general negative psychology. But the fundamentals remained the Tariffs, Full Speed Ahead! The tariff shock is over. There was no downturn, no surge in unemployment, and no significant increase in inflation so far. Major trading partners are signing deals. The stock market is booming. Corporate earnings are up. Consumer spending is steady. It is important now to consider how these models went wrong, and what it means for the forecasting business going Problems with Economic Forecasting There are three problems with current forecasting practices that this episode has clarified:The Volatility Problem The unusual volatility of 'expert opinion' is a serious problem for interpretation or use of these forecasts as a predictive indicator. Volatility is the enemy of measurement generally. The whole science of statistics is essentially focused on mitigating and managing volatility in the data and extracting an actionable signal from all the noise. Whether it is accomplished through simple averaging, or linear regression, or brute force elimination of the outliers, volatility control is critical for making sense of all economic metrics. For example, the raw Consumer Price Index (CPI) is routinely subjected to a number of volatility-reduction processes, from the elimination of the traditionally most volatile components (food and energy) to produce the Core CPI, to more flexible methods like the Sticky CPI, the Median CPI or the Trimmed Mean CPI. Sentiment metrics are often seen as important market signals, usually contrarian ones (i.e, where optimism is a sell signal for investors and pessimism is a buy signal). They can be useful as long as they are systematically stable – and not too volatile. Consumer sentiment is quite stable. The Michigan Consumer Sentiment index is one of the most stable of all major economic indicators, far more stable than the CPI for example. It changes slowly and seems to maintain directional momentum. Academic studies have found that it carries significant predictive power. Professional sentiment or expert opinion, as shown above, is highly unstable – and not just in the most recent episode. The relative standard deviation (that is, the standard deviation divided by the average or mean) for the forecasts making up the Wall Street Journal survey since 2015 is about 4 times higher (that is, four times more volatile) than the Michigan Consumer Sentiment index. This high level of volatility is a prima facie indication that professional forecasts will be difficult to interpret at best. It is an argument against accepting macroeconomic forecasts either as a predictive indicator or as a contrarian market Accuracy Problem A worse problem is the lack of predictive accuracy of these macroeconomic forecasts, especially in the last four years. It seems to make little difference whether they are model-based, or surveys of professional opinion, or whether they are government-issued or produced in the private sector. The International Monetary Fund studied the performance of public and private sector forecasters, and found them 'both are equally good at missing recessions.'Since the 1960's, the New York Federal Reserve has run its own model for predicting recession probabilities, obviously a key factor in the formation of monetary policy. Beginning in the 3rd quarter of 2023, the Fed's estimate of the likelihood of a recession in the following 12 months began to rise, from less than 10% to more than 70% by May 2024. This was the highest level in more than 40 years, twice as high as the pandemic spike in recession probability in 2020, and 75% higher than the 2008 peak associated with the Great Recession. It was a false alarm. A year ago the model predicted with 55% probability that the U.S. would be in a recession right now (July 2025). Yet that recession, predicted so emphatically, has not occurred. What is particularly alarming about the inaccuracy in this case is that the output of this model is ostensibly an input to the formation of monetary policy. A bad gauge on the Fed's dashboard doesn't help the driver, even if he has learned to try and ignore it. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve runs 'the oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States.' It produces two recession-relevant metrics: The Anxious Index registered the same phantom recession signal as the NY Fed's model. In Q3 2022, the consensus among the 40 or so professional forecasters called for a nearly 45% probability of an immanent recession, to occur just 90 days later. It was the highest level in the index since 2008. The community of experts were presumably expressing strong confidence in their prediction, especially over such a short time frame. Yet it was another false alarm. The same survey projected an equally strong prediction in the likelihood of a recession 12 months out. In fact it was the highest reading in the entire history of the survey going back to 1968, displaying an extraordinarily high degree of conviction. And it was also wrong, of course. The economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal fell into the same pothole. [In passing, we may note that Larry Summers bit hard on this recession signal in 2022, calling out 'a very high probability of recession over the next two years' – his estimate at that time was 70%.]Another way to project the possibility of a recession is through the estimate of future Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the accuracy of quarterly GDP forecasts has also been lousy of late. For the past two years, almost every consensus forecast has been too low. Academics have studied the problem, and their conclusions are not encouraging. One study concluded bluntly that 'The predictive content [of macroeconomic models] is unstable over time.' A 2023 study by the St Louis Federal Reserve found that economic recession forecasts had practically zero precision 4 quarters in advance. A University of Louisville economist summarized the literature. 'Very, very, very' indeed. Forecasts are especially inaccurate before and during recessions (according to another St Louis Fed study). The IMF Direction-of-Causality Problem: Prediction or Postdiction Prediction is hard, especially about the future (as the saying goes). It is a lot easier to 'postdict' – to predict something that has already happened. (And yes, that's a real word). John Rekenthaler, the former Vice-President of Research for Morningstar, asked in a recent column 'Can Economists Help Investors Avoid Recessions?' Apparently not. Examining the Philadelphia Fed Survey records, he found that In other words, these forecasts had no value as investment signals. Worse, in 6 out of 8 cases, economists' recession calls were issued after the recession had already started! The average lag since 2000 is more than 4 is ironic, to say the least: predictions that are really 'postdictions'? Or more simply, are they not lagging indicators? Supporting this view, an analysis of The Wall Street Journal survey data since 2015 shows that the higher the forecast probability of a recession, the higher (not lower) the GDP growth 12 months later. The relationship is strongest over the last 5 years. This is the inverse of what we should expect. If a recession prediction is valid, a higher recession probability should correlate with a lower (not higher) GDP growth rate 12 months later. On the other hand, what happens if we reverse the causality? Does the GDP in the current quarter cause/predict a change in economic opinion in the following quarter? Yes it does. The forecasts are negatively correlated (32%) with the previous quarter's GDP level. In other words, the forecasts are postdicting, reacting (with a lag) to an economic downturn that has already started. It is the recession itself that belatedly causes forecasters to issue their recession Sum Macroeconomic forecasting models are the workhorses of professional economics today. They are marketed by the media as oracles of economic truth. Unfortunately, the forecasts they generate are extremely noisy, shockingly inaccurate, and seem to function less as predictions of the future than as belated confirmations of what we already know. These problems are inherent, and well-recognized by many in the profession. Maybe it is time to do something about it. The propagation of wildly inaccurate 'professional' forecasts does no one any good, and may do considerable harm. The turbulence created by the tariff whiplash has exposed these flaws more clearly than ever, and should prompt a thorough reassessment of the value of such pronouncements. (Interestingly, Artificial Intelligence is now being brought to bear on the problem of economic forecasting, with encouraging results – a topic for a future column.)
Sky News
28-07-2025
- Sky News
'Active shooter incident' in New York City - as police officer among at least two people shot
A police officer is among at least two people who have been shot in an "active shooter incident" in New York City, officials say. The incident happened at 345 Park Avenue, a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The building houses some of the country's top financial firms and the National Football League. Two senior officials told Sky's US partner NBC that at least one police officer had been shot along with at least one civilian. Their conditions are unknown. Please refresh the page for the latest version.
Associated Press
28-07-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
New York City authorities respond to report of shooting at midtown building that houses NFL
NEW YORK (AP) — Authorities in New York City are responding to a report of a shooting at a midtown office building that houses some of the country's top financial firms and the National Football League. The Fire Department of New York says emergency crews were called to the Park Avenue office building Monday evening for a report of someone shot. A spokesperson said the call came in around 6:30 p.m. but provided no other details. Police provided no additional information. The city's emergency management alert system warned of traffic delays, road closures and disruptions to public transportation in the area.
Washington Post
28-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
New York City authorities respond to report of shooting at midtown building that houses NFL
NEW YORK — Authorities in New York City are responding to a report of a shooting at a midtown office building that houses some of the country's top financial firms and the National Football League. The Fire Department of New York says emergency crews were called to the Park Avenue office building Monday evening for a report of someone shot. A spokesperson said the call came in around 6:30 p.m. but provided no other details.
