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Is Weather Enough to Fuel a Sustainable Rally?

Storage and Supply Data Continue to Pressure the Market

Are Demand Channels Offering Any Relief?

Can Bulls Clear Technical Hurdles or Is This Just a Bounce?

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Short-Term Forecast: Bearish Below Resistance

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The US president's power to pardon is both one of the most absolute and misunderstood provisions of the Constitution. Rooted in the "prerogative of mercy" of English kings dating back to the seventh century, America's founders wanted a robust pardon power to allow "easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt" by the justice system, as Alexander Hamilton wrote.

Today, the power has become as polarizing as the men using it. On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping pardon for people convicted for their actions in the riot at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In his last weeks in office, Trump's predecessor Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter from convictions on tax and gun violations. He also offered so-called blanket pardons to five other members of his family, expressing concern they'd be unjustly prosecuted under Trump, as well as to leading government officials that Trump has labeled as political enemies and threatened to punish.

A pardon is the legal forgiveness of a crime granted by a president, governor or other executive authority. While in some US states the governor shares the power with a pardon board, the power to pardon federal crimes is the president's alone.

It's not an expungement; the conviction remains on the record. Nor is it a statement on either the guilt or innocence of the individual.

Pardons come under the broader presidential power of executive clemency, which also includes lesser forms of presidential mercy, such as:

Reprieves and remittances are rare in modern times.

Every president except two – William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, who died in office – has issued pardons. Cumulatively, presidents have granted almost 35,000 individual acts of clemency, beginning with the first known pardon by George Washington for the offense of smuggling rum from Barbados in casks smaller than 50 gallons.

The power had generally fallen into relative disuse in recent decades, reserved by presidents, for the most part, for use around the holidays and at the end of their terms.

But Biden was an avid pardoner. As he was leaving office, he released 1,499 convicts serving home confinement – including some convicted of public corruption, commuted 37 death sentences, and shortened the sentences of 2,490 drug offenders who he said received disproportionately long sentences.

As of the last day of his presidency, he had issued a total of 79 pardons and 4,168 commutations to named individuals, which makes him the most prolific employer of presidential clemency in history, granting it more times in a single term than all of his last seven predecessors combined.

In granting a pardon, a president is often communicating his views on justice, mercy, norms and social mores.

The list of those receiving pardons reads like a social history of the US, as presidents seek to heal old conflicts and reconcile the country with a more punitive past. Wars, insurrections, prohibition, the war on drugs – all have been followed years or decades later by rounds of clemency.

In a clear precedent for Trump's pardons of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Washington himself pardoned 10 ringleaders of the tax protest known as the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s who had been convicted of high treason. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers and Gerald Ford pardoned their general, Robert E. Lee.

Some pardons are seen as being more motivated by self-interest. President Richard Nixon pardoned influential US labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, who had been convicted of jury tampering and fraud and later supported Nixon's reelection bid. Bill Clinton pardoned financier Marc Rich, the husband of a major campaign donor, after Rich had been indicted for tax evasion and striking oil deals with Iran during an embargo. On Oct. 23, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who served four months in federal prison for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program at the cryptocurrency exchange. The pardon came after Zhao and Binance became key backers of the Trump family crypto venture World Liberty Financial Inc.

The founders intentionally created the pardon power with few strings attached. Hamilton wrote that it "should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed."

The Supreme Court has held that because it's a power explicitly given to the president in the Constitution,"its limitations, if any, must be found in the Constitution itself."

In other words, a pardon is valid as long as it doesn't violate some other provision of the Constitution. Those cases are undoubtedly narrow; some commentators have argued that acceptance of a bribe for a pardon could possibly invalidate it, but even that isn't clear.

The Constitution does contain two clear limitations. Presidents can grant pardons only for "offenses against the United States," meaning only federal and not state crimes. And there's an exception for cases of impeachment: the president can't use the power to frustrate the power of Congress to remove him or other officials from office.

Neither Congress nor the courts have the power to overturn presidential pardons. However, a president can revoke a pardon if the documents haven't yet been delivered to and accepted by the person receiving clemency.

George W. Bush in 2008 granted a pardon to real estate developer Isaac Toussie, who had been convicted of mail fraud. But just a day later, after learning Toussie's father had made donations to Bush's Republican Party, the president reversed his decision and instructed that the pardon not be given. Because Toussie hadn't received the paperwork, the clemency didn't take effect.

A president could similarly attempt to revoke an undelivered pardon issued by a predecessor. In 1869, Andrew Johnson awarded pardons to three people convicted of fraud. But just days later, President Ulysses S. Grant took office and recalled the members of the US Marshals Service delivering the paperwork, and the pardons were withdrawn.

Most legal scholars say he can't, based in part on the plain language of the power. The Constitution says that the president has the power to "grant" pardons, which means to "bestow" or "transfer" them — in other words, give them to someone else. In addition, in a legal memo crafted just before Nixon's resignation in 1974, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel held that the president can't self-pardon "under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case." In any event, Ford pardoned Nixon for any alleged Watergate crimes.

But the question has never been tested, and even scholars who oppose the idea of the self-pardon concede that it's an open question. Regardless, there's a workaround: A president could temporarily cede power to the vice president, who could issue a pardon as acting president.

The president can't grant a pardon for a crime that has not yet been committed, which would be the equivalent of a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card.

But a person can be pardoned after committing a crime and before any charges have been brought. A seminal 1866 Supreme Court case dealing with Confederate soldiers, Ex parte Garland, held that the pardon power "extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment."

Yes. A president doesn't need to identify the crime committed in order to issue a pardon. The most famous example is Ford's pardon of Nixon for all offenses carried out while he was president.

Biden's 11th-hour pardons of family members and officials identified as enemies by Trump also fall into this category. The relatives included three siblings and two of their spouses. The officials included retired General Mark Milley, infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci, and the members of Congress and staff who served on the committee that investigated the 2021 attack on the US Capitol and recommended that Trump be prosecuted for his role in it.

Those on the panel included Liz Cheney, a former Wyoming Republican congresswoman who helped lead the investigation, and now-Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who also led the prosecution in Trump's first impeachment trial. Biden also pardoned US Capitol and DC Metropolitan police officers who testified before the committee.

Biden's pardon of his son Hunter included the gun and tax evasion charges for which he was convicted but also any other offenses he may have committed for the previous 11 years.

And Trump in his first term pardoned a number of allies, including former political adviser Stephen Bannon and Albert Pirro Jr., the ex-husband of Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, for unspecified "offenses against the United States individually enumerated and set before me for my consideration."

No. Presidents have granted pardons often to people they believed to be innocent or otherwise victims of injustice. For example, Trump posthumously pardoned boxer Jack Johnson, who was convicted in 1913 of transporting a woman across state lines for "immoral purposes" — a crime that frequently formed the basis of racist prosecutions. Biden pardoned service members convicted of violating a now-repealed military ban on consensual gay sex. And in one of his last acts of clemency, he posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist icon convicted of mail fraud in 1923. Civil rights activists have long argued Garvey's prosecution was racially motivated.

The popular notion that a pardon implies guilt comes from a 1915 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Burdick v. United States, which said that a pardon "carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it." Ford kept a dog-eared copy of the decision in his wallet as vindication of his pardon of Nixon.

But later courts have not viewed that "imputation of guilt" as essential to the Burdick decision, which held that someone granted a pardon has the right to refuse it.

"The answer is undoubtedly no," a federal appeals court ruled in February 2024. "The plain language of the Constitution imposes no such limit."

But as a practical and historical matter, it helps to have a record. In that 2024 decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump's verbal statement to former Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown that "I'm gonna do this" and "I want this done" weren't enough to free a man serving a life sentence for drug trafficking and murder.

No again. There's a history of categorical pardons, granting clemency for everyone convicted of a certain offense. President Jimmy Carter used this power to give amnesty to draft dodgers after the Vietnam war and Biden used it for marijuana offenses, for example. In those cases, people convicted of the specified crime can apply to the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department, for a certificate that verifies they're covered by the pardon.

There are two procedural paths. The first, which President Barack Obama followed, requires someone seeking a pardon or commutation to file with the Office of the Pardon Attorney. The office generally considers applications only after a five-year waiting period, and won't consider posthumous pardons or those for misdemeanors. After a thorough review – including an FBI background check – the recommendation goes to the attorney general, the White House Counsel's Office and then to the president, who may grant or deny it.

The second model, favored by Trump, is much looser. In his first term, he often took recommendations from celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Sylvester Stallone, skipped the waiting period and background check, and signed pardons in pomp-filled ceremonies.

Most presidents use a combination of the two, with the more controversial pardons often following the direct path to the president.

One reason to bypass the bureaucracy: The backlog of pardon applications reached record highs under Biden before his final grants brought the logjam down to pre-Trump numbers.

Source: Bloomberg Europe

Source: kitco

Japan began circulating its first new banknotes in 20 years in Tokyo · Reuters

The world's first stablecoin pegged to the yen will be launched in Japan on Monday, a small but significant move in a country where traditional payment means like cash and credit cards dominate financial infrastructure.A Japanese startup, JPYC, said it will begin issuing stablecoins that are fully convertible to the yen and backed by domestic savings and Japanese government bonds (JGB).The move follows U.S. President Donald Trump's support for the sector that has sparked a revival of interest in the idea of using blockchain in the mainstream financial system.

China, too, is considering allowing usage of yuan-backed stablecoins, a sign of growing momentum worldwide of the use of the digital currency - typically pegged to a fiat currency and offering faster and cheaper transactions.Japan's three megabanks will also jointly issue stablecoins, the Nikkei daily reported earlier this month, which may push the digital asset into the mainstream in a once cash-loving population.Stablecoins backed by the U.S. dollar currently dominate the market, accounting for over 99% of the global stablecoin supply, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

In Asia, Japan laid out rules in 2023 to allow issuance of stablecoins. South Korea has also pledged to allow companies to introduce won-based stablecoins.While various financial institutions have announced plans to look at launching stablecoins, policymakers have expressed concern that stablecoins could facilitate the movement of funds outside regulated banking systems and potentially undermine the role of commercial banks in global payment flows."Stablecoins might emerge as a key player in the global payment system, partially replacing the role of bank deposits," Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Ryozo Himino said in a speech last week, urging global regulators to adapt to new realities in the financial system.

Known as a population favouring physical currency, Japan has gradually embraced digital innovation with the ratio of cashless payments having risen to 42.8% in 2024 from 13.2% in 2010, according to government data.The Japanese startup has said it will initially not charge transaction fees for its stablecoins, named JPYC, to focus on expanding its usage, and instead earn money from interest on holdings of JGBs.

Tomoyuki Shimoda, a former BOJ executive who is currently an academic at Japan's Rikkyo University, said it would take time for yen stablecoins to spread unlike those backed by the U.S. dollar - the world's reserve currency used across the globe."There's a lot of uncertainty on whether yen stablecoins will become widespread in Japan," Shimoda said. "If megabanks join the market, the pace could accelerate. But it could still take at least two to three years."

Source: Yahoo Finance