Senate Republicans Call For Own Meeting With Crypto CEOs After Democrats' Sitdown

Summary:

Though the U.S. government remains shut down, the Senate is a hive of crypto activity this week, with Republican lawmakers now matching a planned Democrat meeting with industry leaders set for Wednesday.

After CEOs such as Coinbase's Brian Armstrong and Chainlink's Sergey Nazarov meet with as many as 10 Democratic senators, according to people familiar with the plans, they'll jump to a similar meeting with those lawmakers' Republican counterparts. The chief topic of conversation is the crypto industry's top policy priority: the legislation that would establish U.S. regulation for the broader crypto sector.

The bill — known in the already-approved House of Representatives version as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — had been advancing through the usual process in the Senate, where legislative efforts generally have to lean into bipartisanship to clear the 60-vote threshold. Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee produced a working draft, but Congress then got mired in a budget dispute that shut down the government.

And possibly more importantly, a document showing suggested Democrat language on decentralized finance leaked, causing an uproar from industry insiders who cast it as a potential deal-breaker in the negotiations.

So, the Senate Democrats and leaders from the industry set up a Wednesday meeting to hash things out. And now, Republicans will hear from them, too. In that second meeting, the industry's GOP allies will likely get an indication of which points the CEOs were told by Democrats that they're encouraging movement on.

Industry leaders involved in these meetings are said to include the heads of Kraken, Uniswap, Galaxy Digital, Solana Policy Institute and senior executives from Circle, a16z Crypto and Jito.

A prevailing sentiment from many crypto lobbyists is that it would be difficult to get the market structure bill back on track this year, and next year's midterm elections could make any serious policy efforts difficult. Without this legislation becoming law, the sector is left only halfway to enacting its policy aims in the U.S., having celebrated a first major success with a new law to regulate stablecoin issuers.

And until Congress can get the government's doors open again, lawmakers' chief focus remains on the budget dispute.

When they return to their crypto work, the Republican allies of crypto do have a significant number of like-minded Democrats across the aisle who are ready to approve major crypto legislation. But the Democrats had raised a number of issues to work on, including consumer protection, illicit-finance concerns and the conflicts of interest presented by top government officials engaging in the industry — most notably, President Donald Trump.

Both the Senate Banking Committee and Senate Agriculture Committee must produce and approve of the legislation before it can get a floor vote in the overall Senate. The Agriculture Committee has yet to publish any draft legislation.

"Any durable policy must be bipartisan," said Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, in a statement sent to CoinDesk on Monday, underlining that both parties need to be on board.

An approval in the Senate would send it over to the House for a similar vote. That chamber had already approved the Clarity Act with an overwhelming majority, and some senior members of the House have argued that the Senate could skip a lot of headaches by just voting on the House's Clarity Act and sending it directly to Trump.

Source: CoinDesk

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James Whitman

Economic

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves will announce the government is cutting red tape for businesses in an attempt to boost economic growth as she prepares for a difficult budget next month.

At a regional investment summit on Tuesday, Reeves will hold out the prospect of £6 billion ($8 billion) of annual savings for firms with simpler corporate reporting rules for 100,000 qualifying businesses, according to a statement released by the Treasury. The inaugural meeting will also unveil £10 billion of private-sector investment.

Reeves sees reducing the regulatory burden on companies as crucial to achieve the growth she is seeking to deliver on election promises to boost infrastructure and put the public finances back on track. A government action plan in March concluded that Britain is too risk averse, inhibiting growth and private-sector investment. It featured a goal of cutting business administrative costs by 25%.

However, her announcement of a fresh blitz on “needless form filling” under Labour is likely to be greeted with skepticism in many quarters as British government of all stripes have made similar commitments, only to find the task more difficult in practice.

After Brexit, the previous Conservative administration promised to weed out rules that originated from the European Union. Businesses, however, often proved reluctant to radically change the regulatory environment. In 2023, the Tories under then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ditched plans, dubbed the Brexit bonfire, for thousands of EU-era regulations to expire automatically at the end of the year after warnings that important pieces of legislation could disappear by accident.

“A central part of our Industrial Strategy is slashing needless red tape that blocks business growth, and today is precisely about that,” Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle said.

Reeves is expected to confirm that thousands of companies will no longer be required to produce Strategic Reports and promise less frequent data returns and financial statements for finance firms. Private-sector investments will include £6.5 billion from residential wellness and health-care infrastructure company Welltower and £4.5 billion from the Crown Estates’ Harwell East housing project.

The policies in Reeves’ speech follow cuts to financial services red tape announced at her Mansion House address in July and recent amendments to Labour’s landmark planning bill, which would further reduce local government and legal oversight of planning applications in a bid to cut application times.

The Regional Investment Summit will see over 350 senior business figures meet with central and regional government representatives in Birmingham, central England.

Source: Bloomberg

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James Whitman

Economic

Central Bank

European Central Bank Governing Council member Joachim Nagel warned that undermining public trust in statistics and central banks could backfire economically.

Independent and reliable statistics “are crucial — especially for central banks,” the Bundesbank president said Monday, calling them “the backbone of sound monetary policy.”

“Recently, this principle has come under scrutiny, with elected officials openly questioning the reliability of key economic data that did not seem to fit the government’s view,” he said. “Such assertions carry significant weight. Replacing people who report undesired data carries even more weight.”

The comments, at an event in New York, come after Donald Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner in the wake of weak jobs data and significant revisions to earlier numbers. The US president has also attacked repeatedly Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and sought to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

Nagel cautioned against monetary-policy decisions guided by “political convenience” instead of thorough economic analysis.

“History vividly shows us what can happen when central banks don’t act independently: loss of public confidence, financial turmoil and runaway inflation are not uncommon,” he said.

Source: Bloomberg

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Manuel

Stocks

Bond

After a turbulent week in which some regional U.S. banks flagged bad loan and fraud issues, investors began scrutinizing the lenders' earnings reports for signs of a wider strain across the sector.

However, Zions Bancorporation (ZION.O) posted a rise in third-quarter profit on Monday, helped by stronger interest income, despite the $50 million fraud-related charge-off it announced last week.Since the 2023 banking crisis, investors have had little patience for uncertainty, analysts said. Even isolated loan or fraud troubles now trigger broad-based selloffs as traders rush to reduce exposure."Years of easy credit and low transparency have left investors uncertain about where risks truly lie; even small negative surprises can spark outsized repricing," said Tim Hynes, global head of Credit Research at Debtwire.

The KBW Regional Banking Index (.KRX) has dropped 4.8% this year, lagging the KBW Bank Index (.BKX), which tracks large-cap banks and is up 15.9% so far in 2025.

Last week, bank stocks seesawed sharply after Zions disclosed $50 million in losses tied to two loans and Western Alliance (WAL.N) initiated a lawsuit alleging fraud by Cantor Group V, LLC. Cantor has denied the allegations.Zions' third-quarter profit rose despite the charge-off, lifting the bank's shares 2.9% in after-market trading. Zions' losses were related to two commercial and industrial loans from its California division. The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE.P) rose 2.49% on Monday.

HBT Financial (HBT.O) reported results, with non-performing assets at $8.6 million, or 0.17% of total assets, compared with $6.5 million, or 0.13%, in the prior quarter.

Its shares rose 4.15% on Monday after it agreed to merge with CNB Bank in a deal valued at $170.2 million.

Meanwhile, Jefferies (JEF.N) rose 4.25% on Monday, after sharp drops last week. The bank was caught up in the First Brands collapse, though executives have said the investment bank was "defrauded" and any losses are absorbable.

Among regional lenders, Washington Trust Bancorp (WASH.O) will also report results. The bank had earlier disclosed that its third-quarter profit will be hit by $11.3 million in loan losses.

'ADDITIONAL COCKROACHES'

Even before problems surfaced at Zions and Western Alliance, investor confidence had taken a hit from the twin bankruptcies of auto parts maker First Brands and subprime lender Tricolor.

Fifth Third (FITB.O) booked a $178 million loss last week tied to the bankruptcy of Tricolor, while JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) wrote off $170 million.

"Asset quality metrics across banks have been deteriorating but have held up better than we expected. Losses have been low, so these recent numerous larger loan problems have raised fears of a broader deterioration," said Michael Driscoll, credit rating officer, Global Financial Institutions Ratings at Morningstar DBRS.

"But one of the lessons from 2023 regional bank failures was that banks' funding can unravel faster than in the past if sizable issues emerge."

But many including Fifth Third CEO Tim Spence have downplayed comparisons to the 2023 regional banking crisis, when Silicon Valley Bank's failure sparked a broader turmoil.

"We view recent weakness in the bank group as being driven by three key reasons," Deutsche Bank analysts said. "These include a number of idiosyncratic credit events occurring over a short period of time, less near-term focus over credit overall and mixed messaging from the banks."

Large Wall Street banks last week also described the recent stress as idiosyncratic, but investors worry that problems emerging in quick succession point to deeper cracks in credit quality.

"A wave of additional 'cockroaches' could reset risk tolerance across markets, pressuring valuations and tightening financial conditions further," Hynes said.

Analysts said markets have taken note of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon's recent comment about the potential for more cases like First Brands, amplifying investor anxiety about weaknesses in the industry's more opaque corners.

"When you see one cockroach, there are probably more, and so everyone should be forewarned of this one," Dimon said last week.

Source: Reuters

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Manuel

Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) jumped Monday to retake the $110,000 level, giving crypto stocks a boost and lifting hopes that this month's jolt in markets was a speed bump rather than signaling a broader turn in the cycle.

"Bitcoin is currently in a re-accumulation phase following its short-term correction, with market sentiment stabilizing and institutional demand remaining resilient," Linh Tran, market analyst at online broker XS.com, wrote on Monday.

Along with bitcoin's rise, Strategy (MSTR) stock gained more than 2% after the company disclosed it bought 168 bitcoins at an average price of $112,051 between Oct. 13 and Oct. 19. The company's SEC filing on Monday showed it now holds a total of 640,418 bitcoins, with an aggregate purchase price of $47.4 billion.

Trading platforms Robinhood (HOOD) and Coinbase (COIN) jumped nearly 4.5% and 2.5% respectively. Stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) also gained 3.5% as momentum in the digital asset space grew.

Crypto mining companies, which also focus their powerful infrastructure networks on AI and high-performance computing (HPC), were soaring as well on Monday.

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings (MARA) which has expanded into HPC data centers and AI, gained 6% on Monday. Its peer, Bit Digital (BTBT), also rose 15%, while Cipher Mining (CIFR) rallied 6%.

Adding to the optimism was news that Japan's main financial regulator was considering policy changes that would allow Japanese banks to hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a sign of growing institutional acceptance.

Along with bitcoin's rise, other digital assets gained on Monday, with ether (ETH) reclaiming the $4,000 level following a drawdown to $3,700 last week.

BlackRock head of digital assets Robert Mitchnick noted in an interview with Yahoo Finance that the recent bitcoin mini-crash and sharp sell-off in other digital assets was driven by highly leveraged speculative trading, especially on offshore futures exchanges.

Less than 2% of total bitcoin ownership is represented by the futures contracts held in these offshore exchanges, though they account for the majority of daily trading volume, Mitchnick noted.

"Over time, the more sophisticated sort of long-term buy-and-hold-type investing activity takes over and predominates, but not with that short-term noise," Mitchnick told Yahoo Finance.

Source: Yahoo Finance

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Manuel

Stocks

On energy, grid availability and delivered cost per megawatt-hour shape the feasible pace of model scaling.

Goldman Sachs projects global data center electricity demand rising about 165 percent by 2030 compared to 2023. This trajectory will push data center operators toward long-term power purchase agreements, on-site generation, and siting shifts as new clusters come online in 2026–2029.

McKinsey coverage cited across trade press places the U.S. trajectory at roughly 25 percent compound growth to 2030, with U.S. data centers potentially consuming more than 14 percent of national electricity by decade-end, which raises planning risk if interconnection queues and permitting timelines stretch relative to hardware deliveries.

The regulatory lane remains fluid, although the UK Competition and Markets Authority concluded in March 2025 that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI did not qualify for a merger investigation, a baseline that may be revisited if new equity-linked supply arrangements intensify market power concerns around access and pricing.

Custom silicon is the cost lever to watch as Broadcom’s program moves from design to deployment.

If the accelerator, networking and rack co-design work delivers material performance per watt gains, inference cost of goods and training efficiency can reset the unit economics of the circular model toward self-funding cash flows as utilization builds.

Execution risk sits with toolchains, packaging and memory bandwidth, and the timeline begins in 2H26 with a multi-year ramp through 2029, so financial outcomes for vendors and operators will track the speed at which those gains appear in audited margins and contract pricing.

The immediate map of commitments is clear, and the conversion of framework deals into firm purchase orders, disclosed in vendor filings and press updates, is a near-term checkpoint.

CoreWeave’s financing and deal flow, including any corporate actions and the evolution of Nvidia’s ownership, will show how tight the loop becomes between supplier equity, infra capacity and OpenAI’s demand pathway.

Apple’s system-level integrations widened consumer surface area in 2024 with privacy terms that state requests are not stored by OpenAI and IP addresses are obscured, which provides a counterpoint to enterprise adoption cycles that tend to move on compliance and ROI milestones rather than device reach alone.

The question for portfolio and treasury planning is how the announced gigawatts match realized workload growth, regional power deliverability and the cost trajectory through 2028. A practical way to track the shift from circular to sustainable is to pair data-center utilization metrics with energy contract coverage ratios and the mix of revenue from usage-linked enterprise agreements.

If those measures improve as 2H26 deployments begin, the financing loops embedded in these deals function as bridge capital to a steadier compute economy rather than as a source of correlation risk across vendors, infra providers, and the lab. OpenAI Builds $300B Bubble Machine: The Feedback Loop Rewiring Wall Street Finance_1

OpenAI Builds $300B Bubble Machine: The Feedback Loop Rewiring Wall Street Finance_1

The forward path concentrates into a 24 to 36-month window when the first Broadcom systems and AMD waves come online, power contracts finalize at Stargate sites, and revenue-backed consumption ramps through enterprise channels. OpenAI says the Broadcom rollout finishes by the end of 2029.

Source: Cryptoslate

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Manuel

Central Bank

Bond

Some Wall Street analysts now believe the Federal Reserve will pull the plug on its long-running effort to shrink its balance sheet at the end of the month.

These central bank watchers believe the ground has shifted for quantitative tightening, or QT, due to mounting money market friction, which could threaten the Fed’s control over the interest rate target it uses to achieve its inflation and employment goals.

Stopping the withdrawal of liquidity by QT at the October 28-29 Federal Open Market Committee meeting would help ensure the technical aspects of monetary policy continue to run well, these analysts reckon.

“We expect the FOMC to end its securities runoffs at this month’s meeting,” analysts at Wrightson ICAP said in a note over the weekend. While they’re skeptical genuine liquidity tightness has emerged in money markets, some of the recent turbulence in short-term lending “is clearly a sufficient warning sign to justify moving on to the next phase of the Fed’s normalization plan.”

Evercore ISI forecasters wrote on Monday “we think the Fed will now signal the end of QT at its October meeting with a view to wrapping up before year-end pressures, although the actual end may come a month or two after the announcement.”

Jefferies analysts told clients “we expect that the Fed will completely cease QT at the next meeting at the end of the month,” although the Fed is likely to allow mortgage bonds, which have been very slow to come off its books due to challenging housing market conditions, to expire at the current pace.

The shift in sentiment follows market moves last week that saw some key short-term borrowing rates rise as some financial firms unexpectedly tapped the Fed’s Standing Repo Facility, which exists to provide fast cash loans collateralized by bond holdings.

Also signaling market friction: A rise in repo borrowing costs and the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, as the federal funds rate, the Fed’s main interest rate target, drifted higher in its current range of between 4% and 4.25%.

That all happened as Fed Chair Jerome Powell in remarks on October 14, said QT might end “in coming months,” even as he echoed other Fed officials who have said recently there remains plenty of liquidity in the financial system. Fed Governor Christopher Waller, who spoke in New York on Thursday, said “we're about at that point” where the financial system has the right amount of liquidity, as measured by banking sector reserves.

QT RIP

The QT process is designed to remove liquidity from the financial system added during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a bid to provide stimulus and bond market stability the Fed aggressively bought Treasury and mortgage bonds to lower long-term interest rates.

Those purchases, kicking off in large size in the spring of 2020, more than doubled total Fed holdings to $9 trillion by the summer of 2022. Since then the Fed has allowed a set amount of bonds to mature and not be replaced, taking holdings to the current level of $6.6 trillion.

The Fed has said it seeks to leave enough liquidity in the system to allow for firm control over short-term interest rates and to allow for normal money market volatility. The challenge for the Fed is that it’s unclear how much liquidity it can remove before markets grow too volatile, so Wall Street has struggled to predict when QT would end.

The recent chop in money markets is driven by a number of factors, Fed balance sheet policy included. “There are a number of reasons why this is the case, including some idiosyncratic factors related to tax payment dates, Treasury auction settlements, and increased bill issuance; the biggest factor is the result of the Fed's ongoing balance sheet normalization,” the Jefferies analysts wrote.

Still, the challenge of getting a hold on the amount of money market liquidity that would meet the Fed criteria has kept alive views that QT has further to run, especially as bank reserve levels thus far have been stable and QT has thus far mainly extinguished excess liquidity parked in the Fed’s reverse repo facility. To that end, bank reserves have come down but have been fairly close to $3 trillion for some time.