A bronze statue of pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto (Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images) |
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Yesterday, a CEO offered a novel, all-encompassing excuse for their company’s travails on its earnings call. In short: we’re not struggling because we’re a bad business. We’re struggling because American society is in a bad place. And we’d be the first to agree that the past month especially has been tumultuous! But the company in question isn’t involved in metals or energy or chips, but in fake meat: it’s former retail darling Beyond Meat, which tried to blame MAHA for its woes, but our chart tells a different story.
Stocks continued their climb on Wednesday on optimism that the war with Iran could conclude soon. Every sector traded higher except for energy, which fell along with the price of oil, and consumer staples. The industrials and communications sectors led gains.
Reminder: the US stock market is closed tomorrow for Good Friday. We’ll hop back into your inbox on Monday! |
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Google researchers sent a wake-up call Tuesday, saying quantum machines will require fewer resources in the future to break classical cryptography. |
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This is a big deal for stuff like bitcoin, which is predicated on the idea that blockchain cryptography will remain sufficiently difficult to break for the foreseeable life of the asset.
- “The emergence of CRQCs [cryptographically relevant quantum computers] represents a serious threat to cryptocurrencies that demands a close examination of possible developments at the intersection of quantum computing and digital finance,” Google’s white paper says.
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The analysis showed a twentyfold reduction in the amount of resources needed by a quantum machine to break the cryptography backing blockchain networks.
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The paper continued, “While the quantum computing and cryptocurrency communities have largely operated in isolation, the significant reduction in resource requirements detailed here necessitates a convergence of these two worlds.”
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“Their fast-clock architecture could crack a private key in 9 minutes, while bitcoin blocks take 10 minutes on average. That changes the threat model entirely,” Alex Pruden, CEO and cofounder of quantum computing research firm Project Eleven, told Sherwood News. “Every bitcoin transaction is at risk.” |
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While a quantum computer capable of successfully exploiting a blockchain does not exist yet, Google researcher Craig Gidney has placed a 10% chance one will be built by 2030. Meanwhile, Google landed on a 2029 timeline to migrate its infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography.
Not only are 6.7 million bitcoin — including those believed to belong to bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto — vulnerable to future quantum attacks, but so are the protocols underlying the tokenization market of real-world assets, which, the paper projects, will exceed $16 trillion by 2030. |
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Oil and commodities stocks soared. Value stocks outperformed growth favorites. And stocks and bonds, broadly, sank in lockstep over the last month. Heck, even dividends — a tried-and-true defense against both inflation and lousy market performance — are showing signs of coming back into favor.
A wartime whiff of stagflation permeated the markets in March. |
- “If the conflict persists, the combination of slower growth and higher inflation would create a stagflationary environment, historically the worst backdrop for equities,” analysts with Ned Davis Research wrote in a report published Tuesday.
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The 1970s were a particularly brutal decade for stocks. The S&P 500 rose just 17% during those 10 years — about as much as the market gains in a single average positive year — as multiple Mideast oil supply shocks and large government debt kept inflation at an average of 7%, sometimes much higher.
- “The parallels between 2026 and the stagflationary 1970s are the most compelling in four decades,” Renaissance Macro Research wrote in late March. “Oil above $100, a Fed caught between mandates, sticky inflation, slowing growth, a weakening dollar, and a narrow market driven by overvalued technology — all echo the 1970s playbook.”
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Even after the S&P 500 posted its best day of the year on Tuesday on speculation that the Trump administration could end the war with Iran, the blue chips were still down 5.1% in March, their worst monthly performance since the previous March as well as cementing the first quarter of 2026 as the worst for the S&P 500 since Q3 2022.
Meanwhile, the broad bond market also got battered last month. The Bloomberg US aggregate bond index — a broad gauge of the bond market — dropped roughly 2%, its worst month since October 2024. |
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The characteristics of stocks that performed well over the last month also shifted, as quality companies with little debt and consistent profits gained favor. Such so-called value stocks are often thought to be better able to weather any potential downturn than companies with flakier fundamentals, which have soared on momentum and retail exuberance in recent months, but many momentum high-flyers had a brutal March.
Interestingly, of the typical factors that investors spotlight, high-dividend shares were the best performers in March — falling only 3%. That likely reflects the fact that a lot of energy stocks are included in that category. But buying dividend-paying stocks that provide real income growth is also seen as an effective defense in a stagflationary environment.
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