After speculation following the election of Donald Trump that the president-elect would tax the banks’ profits, the Federal Reserve began to seriously question whether it would be able to operate as it has since 1913. The next day Trump’s nominee to head the Fed, Jerome Powell, was confirmed and in his first public statement since his appointment, the Fed chairman-designate stated he intends to keep the Fed in a “highly accommodative monetary policy” but this might not come into play for at least another two years.
It might be estimated that Airbnb still draws less than 1% of the $1 trillion a year spent on hotel stays in the US each year, but with more than 6 million people signed up for the global short-term accommodation service, it is not only considered one of the world’s most innovative businesses, but it also has the potential to bring millions of new Americans to the cities where they work and live.
Those strong ties helped it earn a record-breaking $112 million as the top stock of Silicon Valley during the first quarter of 2017. But while this is a reflection of its trajectory, this year’s success is all the more remarkable considering it was almost wiped out by a collapse in the value of cryptocurrencies in January after a plunge in the price of Bitcoin, which was once the world’s most valuable crypto currency but has since lost more than two-thirds of its value to fall back to below $7,000.
Following the Bank of England’s warning of the risks to financial stability associated with unregulated digital currencies, some of the world’s biggest banks have gone one step further than the UK central bank by publishing a set of standards designed to help stop digital currencies being used as a “binge loan sharking” tool by criminals. Among the steps taken by the world’s biggest banks are to set limits on the number of digital currencies customers can hold in a transaction, establish clear standards to validate the authenticity of transactions and prevent digital currency exchanges being used as vehicles for laundering illicit money.