Daily Updates:

• President Trump’s blanket tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminium went into effect yesterday, reviving an initial tariff from his first presidency. In response, Canada announced another set of their own “dollar for dollar” tariffs – this time imposing 25% levies on C$30B ($20.8B) of US products, including steel and aluminum. Note, Justin Trudeau already imposed a separate tariff on C$30B of various US products last week. 

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• After three weeks of US equities slowly grinding downwards which then turned into a bigger sell-off on Monday, US equities actually closed the day higher yesterday – the S&P 500 gained 0.49% with the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 up by 1.13%.
• That reprieve in markets followed the first CPI print since July 2024 where headline and core year-over-year inflation both fell. The February CPI report showed the consumer price index was up 2.8% on a 12-month basis, below the expected 2.9% and down from 3.0% in January. The core measure rose by 3.1%, below economists’ expectations of 3.2%. 
• However, those less-than-expected prints obscured a slightly more worrying picture in the data: the core inflation rose due to advances in indexes such as “medical care, used cars and trucks, household furnishings and operations, recreation, apparel, and personal care” – while Trump’s tariff implementations may not have affected the February numbers, many of those items are likely to be affected in future reports. Additionally, while the index for shelter had its smallest 12-month increase since December 2021, shelter prices still accounted for nearly 50% of the overall increase in monthly prices, continuing a trend of still sticky housing inflation.  
• BTC went through quite the whirlwind itself yesterday as markets continue to decompose the impact of tariffs on growth and inflation. After initially rising following the CPI print, it fell in tandem with the fall in US equities at their market open – then as the day went on, BTC steadily rose to $84K, now trading $1K shy of that. 
• Its term structure of implied volatility has compressed almost into a flat structure, marking a shift away from the inverted state we have seen for much of the early parts of this month. ETH’s term structure of volatility however still remains inverted, though vol levels at the front-end have dropped close to 10 points since yesterday, with the back-end remaining relatively unchanged. 
• Skew levels for ETH at all tenors excluding the 7-day have lost some of their bias towards puts as its spot price continues to trade sideways since the beginning of the week, though only the 180-day tenor option assigns a call-premium. 

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• Binance secures a record $2B investment from Abu Dhabi’s MGX, granting MGX a minority stake in the exchange. The deal aims to advance AI, blockchain, and financial innovation while marking Binance's first institutional funding.
• World Liberty Financial (WLFI) has reached a 24.97B token sale out of the 25B initially allocated for sale. This marks a 99.88% sale.

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This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day: