Next Week News

Reflecting a sharp decline in expectations, the Conference Board released a report on Tuesday showing a much bigger than expected drop in U.S. consumer confidence in the month of January.

Lynn Franco, Senior Director of Economic Indicators at the Conference Board, noted expectations saw a significant drop due to financial market volatility and the government shutdown.

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Crypto currency investors with the New Zealand based crypto exchange Cryptopia has lost more than 16 million USD of crypto coins including more that 3,5 million worth of Ethereum coins after a hacker attack.

The hackers reportedly targeted 76 000 crypto wallets, after gaining access to the private keys of the wallets, kept by the exchange.

The attack is also unusual in that the funds were not stolen at once, but over five days in early January.

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Australia posted a seasonally adjusted merchandise trade surplus of A$3.681 billion in December, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.

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Australians have lost $926 401 to investment scams in January 2019, revealed the latest Scamwatch report issued by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC).

Although the figure seems solid, it actually marks a decrease of 48% when compared to previous month, and nearly 80% decline from January 2018, when the total loss to investment scams amounted to $4 631 103.

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Investors were provided with further insight into the Federal Reserve's decision to change the forward guidance language and indicate a patient approach to raising interest rates in the minutes of the central bank's January monetary policy meeting.

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A successful operation of the low enforcement authorities in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria has led to the arrests of several people, among which the Izraeli citizen Gal Barak, who is accused of running an online trading scam ring that has stolen over 100 million Euro form retail investors across Europe in 2018 alone.

Barak was arrested in Sofia earlier this month and awaits deportation to Austria, where he is expected to stand trial.

The organization run by Barak operated a number of fake online forex, crypto and binary options brokers.

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UK employment level climbed to a record high in the three months to January, while the jobless rate eased to its lowest level since the mid-1970s, preliminary data from the Office for National Statistics showed on Tuesday.

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Ukraine authorities have taken action against Forex Trend Limited, which they accuse of running an international forex pyramid scheme, that has robed several thousand Ukraine and European Union citizens of 12,5 million USD.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the main security agency in the country, announced on Tuesday that it has blocked all known assets of Forex Trend Limited, after conducting a series of raids against offices of the scammers and their associates in Kyiv, Zaporizhia, Dnipro and Kharkiv region. SBU managed seize evidence in the form of documents, fake seals and digital storage media, as well as cash received from a transaction, gold bars, gilded watches and guns.

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European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said on Wednesday that the bank's monetary policy stance remained accommodative in the face of weaker growth outlook for the euro area.

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A recent report by the trading analytics platform The Tie shows that most of the trading volume on the world’s largest crypto currency exchanges is questionable.

The research group analyzed the internet traffic on the top 100 crypto exchange websites and found that that more than 75% of the reported trading volumes exceeded twice the expected amounts. As a whole the The Tie says nearly 90% of the exchanges’ volume is suspicious.

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