Daily Update:

• China has confirmed the retaliatory tariffs announced earlier last week against $14B worth of goods from the US. 
• The levies range from 15% on US imports such as liquid natural gas and coal, and 10% on crude oil, agricultural machinery and automotive goods. 

• President Trump has also announced some additional blanket tariffs of his own: speaking to reporters yesterday the President confirmed he would impose 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. 
• The tariff announcements coincided with a temporary pullback in BTC spot from $96K to as low as $94,800 before a sharp recovery above $97K. ETH experienced a similar, but sharper downward move to $2.5K but has only pared its losses back to where it fell from when the tariffs were initially announced. 

• Yesterday’s CPI data in China showed the largest monthly increase over the past five months, with headline YoY inflation in January increasing 0.5% – up from 0.1% in December. 
• The larger than expected figure was largely due to the holiday period which saw an increased demand for food, gasoline and services – with the latter accounting for more than half of the overall CPI increase. The Producer Price Index (PPI) , on the other hand, decreased to 2.3% YoY in January, stayed flat with December’s rate.

DeFi:

• Klarna, popular for its Buy Now, Pay Later services, has announced on X that it’s looking to and currently considering ideas on how to “embrace crypto”.
• The Ethereum Foundation has followed through with its bid to support DeFi on its chain, transferring 50,000 ETH (approximately $131.6 million) from their EthDev account  to EF: DeFi Multisig.
• Although now deactivated on X for separate reasons, Kanye West posted several crypto related posts, including him declining a memecoin through a third party company and a separate screenshot of an ask for Coinbase’s CEO contact details.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts Of The Day: