The founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio, has warned on Thursday that the US is on a “classic path” toward “some form” of a civil war.

The current financial conditions and irreconcilable differences in desires and values are consistent with the ingredients leading to civil strife, according to him.

“Not knowing what is true because of distortions in the media and propaganda increases as people become more polarized, emotional, and politically motivated,” Dalio wrote on LinkedIn.

He pointed to a number of factors that led him to this notion, including large deficits, high taxes, inflation, and wealth disparity that bring about political polarization.

“When that happens at the same time as there are foreign powers that are becoming strong enough to challenge the leading world power that is encountering this civil war dynamic, it is an especially risky period. That is the period I believe we are now in,” Dalio stressed, adding that “the biggest question is how much the system will bend before it breaks.”

He noted that political powers from opposing sides are “fighting to win at all costs,” making it impossible to compromise and leaving many “too afraid” to speak up or run for public office. 

“History shows that the biggest risk to democracies is that they produce such fragmented and antagonistic decision-making that they are ineffective and disorderly, which leads to bad results and revolutions.”

READ MORE: US billionaire predicts civil war in the country

Dalio predicts that this year’s elections will become the turning point for US internal politics.

“In the 2022 elections we will see losses by moderates and gains by extremists/populists […] because each side wants fighters not compromisers. The Supreme Court will make decisions on contentious issues that people are willing to fight over. There is a big risk that each side will view the decisions as unfairly made by the other side and not accept them, which will lead to tests of power,” he predicts.

This is not the first time Dalio voiced such dire forecasts. In November last year he published a book ‘Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail’, where he also warned of a “dangerously high risk” of a civil war in the US within the next 10 years due to the “exceptional amount of polarization.”

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Russia’s Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed a second long-term contract on Friday for the supply of 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas from the Russian Far East. The agreement comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin is in China on an official visit.

According to Gazprom, the agreement is “an important step in further strengthening mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and China in the gas sector.” After the project reaches its full capacity, the volume of Russian pipeline gas supplies to China via the Far East route will reach 48 billion cubic meters per year (including deliveries via the Power of Siberia gas pipeline).

Gazprom’s largest natural gas deposit in the Far East is the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye field, where production is due to begin in 2023.

“The signing of the second contract for the supply of Russian gas to China testifies to the highest level of mutual trust and partnership between our countries and companies. Our Chinese partners from CNPC confirm that Gazprom is a reliable gas supplier,” the head of Gazprom, Alexey Miller, said.
Russian energy supplies to China have reached record highs, according to Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov.

Gazprom and the CNPC signed their first 30-year contract on gas supplies via the Power of Siberia pipeline in 2014. The 3,000km (1,864 mile) cross-border pipeline, the first natural gas pipeline between Russia and China, started deliveries three years ago.

In 2015, the sides agreed on gas supplies via the western route, or the Power of Siberia 2, which will deliver gas from Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, where Russia’s biggest gas reserves are. The new pipeline will be able to transfer up to 50 bcm more gas through Mongolia to China annually.

In January, Gazprom completed an analysis of the project to build the Soyuz Vostok gas pipeline through Mongolia to China, which will make it possible to supply up to 50 billion cubic meters of gas per year to China.

Analysts say Moscow’s ‘gas pivot’ to China poses a challenge for Europe, which has been struggling with skyrocketing energy prices in recent months. Russia remains Europe’s main gas supplier, but the changes it is currently making to its energy transport infrastructure should be taken seriously, analysts note.

Europe’s 541 bcm of annual gas consumption is more than China’s 331 bcm, but the latter is expected to rise to 526 bcm by 2030 as Beijing reduces its dependence on coal. Consulting firm McKinsey estimates that China’s demand for gas will double by 2035. Its annual gas consumption is expected to reach 620 bcm by 2040 and overtake oil as the leading fuel source by 2050, according to data made public in September by Chinese energy giant Sinopec.

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Sports apparel giant Nike has filed a lawsuit against online reseller StockX in a New York federal court on Thursday for the unauthorized sale of Nike shoe NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

In the court filings, Nike complained that StockX began selling NFTs of its sneakers last month, informing customers they would be able to exchange the virtual tokens for real shoes “in the near future.” The online platform has allegedly sold over 500 Nike-branded NFTs so far.

Nike deemed the action an infringement on its trademarks and said the NFT sales would confuse customers. In the lawsuit, the company demanded an order to block the Nike-associated NFT sales on StockX. It also wants the reseller to pay damages, but the amount has not been disclosed.

The lawsuit states that the NFT sale “inflated prices and murky terms of purchase and ownership,” while also marring Nike’s business reputation.

READ MORE: Crypto money laundering jumps 30% in 2021

Nike announced it will release a number of its own virtual products later in February in collaboration with digital art studio RTFKT, which it bought last year.

It is not the first lawsuit over NFTs, which have been gaining in popularity recently. Earlier this month, US rapper Lil Yachty sued music NFT start-up Opulous for trademark infringement, claiming that the firm “maliciously” used his name and image. In January, French luxury design house Hermes sued artist Mason Rothschild over ‘MetaBirkin’ NFTs named after Hermes’ famous Birkin handbags. In November 2021, Miramax studio sued director Quentin Tarantino after he announced plans to auction ‘Pulp Fiction’ movie NFTs.

NFTs are non-fungible tokens, which are units of digital data stored and traded online. Most NFTs are digital files such as photos, videos, and audio recordings.

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Meta (formerly Facebook) shares dropped around 26% at the opening of trading on Thursday after Facebook’s quarterly report missed earnings expectations. The report also revealed that the number of the social media platform’s global daily active users declined from the previous quarter for the first time on record, to 1.929 billion from 1.93 billion.

Amid the nosedive, the company’s market value plunged by $240 billion to about $660 billion.

Meta blamed Apple and TikTok for Facebook’s poor performance, claiming Apple’s privacy changes to its operating system made it difficult for brands to use advertising mechanisms on Facebook and Instagram.

READ MORE: Facebook stock in free-fall

The report also cited macroeconomic issues like supply chain disruptions as one of the reasons behind low fourth quarter earnings, while in his conversation with investors, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg complained that Facebook is facing growing competition from rivals like TikTok.

Statistics show that at its current level, Meta’s drop is the largest single-day collapse in US market history.

Moreover, the Meta plunge has triggered a sell-off on the tech-oriented Nasdaq composite index, with SP 500 shedding 1.6%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.8% as of 17:00 GMT. Twitter, Snap, Spotify, and a number of other social media companies were among the stocks which also lost value following Meta’s drop.

Thursday’s stock crash could wipe out around $24 billion, or nearly 20%, of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The drop in Zuckerberg’s wealth from $120 billion to $97 billion would rank among the biggest ever, only rivaled by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk’s fortune swings. Musk lost $35 billion in one day in November last year when Tesla stock dropped after Musk’s Twitter poll on the sale of Tesla shares.

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A lawyer for Tesla told a US appeals court on Wednesday that a 2018 tweet by chief executive Elon Musk suggesting factory workers would lose stock options if they unionized was not an unlawful threat, because it simply reflected the position of the union.

The tweet came amid the United Auto Workers (UAW) union’s years-long campaign to organize workers at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. It said: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing?”

Two days after the initial tweet, Musk said in a separate Twitter thread that it was the UAW, and not the company, that opposed stock options.

In March, Tesla appealed an order by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Musk delete the tweet. According to a judge, the labor board wasn’t “completely out of line,” as Musk’s tweet could be interpreted as a message that “the price you will have to pay if you unionize is you’ll give up your stock options.”

Tesla attorney David Salmons told the hearing on Wednesday that the constitutional right to free speech under the First Amendment “protects an employer’s robust speech about the downsides to unionization.” Taken in context, the tweet is really a “statement about what the union, not the company, will or will not do,” he said.

Meanwhile, a lawyer representing UAW, Daniel Curry, argued to the panel that Musk’s tweet was “a threat of retaliation, not a lawful expression of opinion.” The subsequent message only sowed further confusion, Curry said, adding: “The idea they’re putting out there that a union could take away an employee’s stock options just doesn’t fit with reality.”

Curry also pointed out that Musk’s history of making major announcements and controversial statements on social media would reasonably lead Tesla workers to take him at his word. “That is how Musk uses Twitter. Just like a press release,” he said.

Musk has a long history of controversial tweets, which has led to lawsuits. Tesla is facing a suit from investors over another 2018 post by the CEO, in which he said funding was secured to take the company private. In another case, a British cave explorer unsuccessfully sued Musk for calling him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.

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The UK’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) is lifting the price cap for domestic energy bills by 54%, the regulator said in a press release on Thursday.

“The energy price cap will increase from 1 April for approximately 22 million customers. Those on default tariffs paying by direct debit will see an increase of £693 from £1,277 to £1,971 ($2,670) per year,” the press release reads.

The energy price cap sets a maximum amount energy suppliers can charge customers for the gas and electricity they use. According to Ofgem, the cap “stops energy companies from making excessive profits, ensuring customers pay no more than a fair price for their energy.”

Ofgem sets the cap every six months based on the underlying costs to supply energy, with the previous rise in October hiking energy bills by 12% to an all-time high of £1,277 ($1,731) a year for around 15 million households.

Ofgem says the latest cap hike is made in response to a “record rise in global gas prices over the last 6 months, with wholesale prices quadrupling in the last year” and resulting in closures of dozens of utilities.

READ MORE: Heating costs double in Europe’s biggest economy

“Over the last year, 29 energy companies have exited the market or been put in special administration in the wake of soaring global gas prices, affecting around 4.3 million domestic customers,” the regulator states.
Ofgem expects the cap lift to affect default tariff customers, who haven’t yet switched to a fixed deal on energy consumption.

“This is because energy companies cannot afford to supply electricity and gas to their customers for less than they have paid for it,” the press release says. The regulator, however, noted that it is preparing other measures in order to tackle the worsening energy crisis, including changing the frequency of price cap updates “to ensure that it still reflects the true cost of supplying energy.”

UK consumers are already suffering from soaring prices on everything from energy to consumer goods as inflation races toward its fastest pace in three decades. Ofgem’s announcement also came mere hours before the Bank of England revealed a new interest-rate hike of 0.5%.

On the bright side, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has just announced a package to help households pay their power bills, which will provide £350 ($476) to the “vast majority of households” to offset Ofgem’s cap hike. However, many experts say this will only cushion the impact, with social media users already dubbing Ofgem’s cap move “black Thursday.”

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One of the most popular bridges linking the Ethereum and Solana blockchains became a victim of a hack attack on Wednesday resulting in a crypto theft worth more than $320 million. 

Developers representing Wormhole confirmed the exploit on its Twitter account, saying the network bridge is currently down while the team investigates a potential exploit. The official website says that the portal is temporarily unavailable.

Wormhole is a protocol that lets users move their tokens and NFTs between Solana and Ethereum. Crypto holders often do not operate exclusively within one blockchain ecosystem, so developers have built cross-chain bridges to let users send their digital assets from one chain to another. 

It is DeFi’s second-biggest exploit ever, and the largest attack to date on Solana, which is increasingly gaining traction in the non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems. 

“The $320 million hack on Wormhole Bridge highlights the growing trend of attacks against blockchains protocols,” blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK co-founder Ronghui Gu was quoted as saying by CNBC. “This attack is sounding the alarms of growing concern around security on the blockchain.”

Meanwhile, the founder of Solana DeFi platform Step Finance, George Harrap, told CoinDesk he expects Jump Capital, which purchased Wormhole developer Certus One, to step in to backstop the hacked ETH. Otherwise, he said, a number of Solana-based platforms that accept ETH as collateral may now be partially insolvent.

“If nobody backs it and the coins are truly gone then Wormhole ETH is worth 0 and everyone who has a balance of it becomes worthless, DeFi protocols, users, everyone,” Harrap said.

Cryptocurrency platforms have suffered a number of high-value hacks in recent years. In August, Poly Network was hit by a major attack that saw the hacker steal more than $600 million worth of tokens. The theft was thought to be the biggest crypto heist ever, surpassing the $534.8 million stolen from Japanese digital currency exchange Coincheck in 2018 and the estimated $450 million worth of Bitcoin that went missing from Tokyo-based Mt. Gox in 2014.

Poly Network’s hacker, however, gave back nearly all of the money, with the exception of $33 million of Tether that was frozen by its issuers.

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China is ready to showcase its state digital currency, the e-CNY, as an official payment method at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which kicks off on Friday.

According to a statement from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), all payment services related to the Olympics have been prepared, including accounts, bank cards, mobile payments, cash, and the digital yuan.

The e-CNY is China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), which is essentially a clone of the fiat yuan in the form of a digital asset. Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, which are banned in China, the e-CNY is fully controlled and governed by the central bank.

READ MORE: China names its most successful financial app

The e-CNY is already accepted at the Beijing Olympics’ official store in the Main Media Center (MMC), which officially began 24-hour operations on Monday.

The Olympics will be part of a gradual e-CNY rollout, which has already been test-launched in five major Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. On January 4, the PBOC also launched the e-CNY wallet on the iOS and Android app stores countrywide. By mid-January, the e-CNY wallets had nearly 261 million individual users, roughly one-fifth of the entire Chinese population, with e-CNY apps ranking as the fastest-growing by downloads in the country.

However, the e-CNY is still in pilot mode. Although the wallet is available for download across the entire country, only users from the five pilot cities and the Olympics venue can sign up and actually use the digital currency. For now, the e-CNY can only be used for a limited number of transactions.

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Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta went into a nosedive after the markets closed on Wednesday, following an underwhelming quarterly report, the first since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change.

The stock stood strong at $323 a share when the markets closed at 4pm EST, but collapsed to $249 just half an hour later, for a loss of almost 23%. In just the first 11 minutes of after-hours trading, $16 billion in Meta’s market cap had been wiped out. 

What triggered the sell-off was Meta’s quarterly report showing lower revenue, earnings per share, and the numbers of daily and monthly active users than expected by investors.

Whereas investors expected around $30.15 billion, Facebook’s figures showed $27-$29 billion, CNBC reported, citing a Refinitiv survey of market analysts. According to the same source, earnings per share came in at $3.67, short of the expected $3.84. 

READ MORE: Meta pulls plug on crypto project

The number of daily active users (DAU) stood at 1.93 billion, less than the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users (MAU) also undershot the 2.95 expectation, ending up at 2.91 billion, according to Street Account.

This is the first quarterly report since Zuckerberg announced his social media behemoth would be changing its name to Meta, to better represent its focus on the upcoming metaverse and encompass the existing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp brands.

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The latest speculation about Russia’s hypothetical invasion of Ukraine and potential sanctions pledged by Western countries in response has raised serious concerns about energy security in Europe, which has already been shaken by the pandemic and the Covid-related supply crunch stretching across each and every sector of the region’s economy.

Europe is going through a severe energy crisis, with surging prices for heating and electricity placing an intolerable burden on households and businesses.

Russian gas supplies account for roughly 40% of Europe’s consumption, with any disruption of deliveries expected to aggravate the current situation and cause spikes in energy prices.

Though major energy producers like Qatar or Azerbaijan have pledged emergency gas supplies to the region, the volumes shipped by Russia are reportedly hard to replace without affecting other big consumers across the world, especially in Asia, the world’s fastest-growing market.

READ MORE: Russian gas deliveries though Ukraine resume after dramatic drop – reports

“Europe has no alternative to Russian gas,” BCS Global Markets Senior Analyst Ron Smith said as quoted by Bloomberg. “You would have to divert half of the LNG that Asia consumes in order to replace Gazprom PJSC. And what would that mean? That would mean massive energy shortages all across Asia, you would export Europe’s energy crisis to Asia,” the expert added.

According to Qatar’s energy minister, Saad Al-Kaabi, the volumes of gas the EU needs can’t be replaced by any one supplier unilaterally without disturbing deliveries to other regions.

The official stressed the importance of fulfilling obligations under long-term contracts with existing customers, and said strengthening European energy security would inevitably take collective efforts from a number of gas producers.

READ MORE: Heating costs double in Europe’s biggest economy

Increased competition for liquefied natural gas (LNG) is expected to keep prices high, according to the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank, as cited by the agency. The researchers say that Europe would have to curb demand in case of any prolonged disruption lasting through the next two winters.

Europe currently relies on the LNG that’s been arriving on its shores, helping to ease high prices, but Asia is expected to regain its spot as a premium export market for US cargoes of the fuel as early as May, according to BloombergNEF calculations.

“This idea that ‘we will fill the gap with LNG’ – no, you can’t. It’s physically impossible to do, there’s not enough LNG in the world to do that,” Smith told the agency.

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