General Motors intends to boost spending on EV production to topple Elon Musk’s company
American automotive giant General Motors said on Tuesday it will pour $6.6 billion into boosting its electric pickup truck production and building a new electronic vehicle (EV) battery cell plant in its home state of Michigan.
The carmaker wants to overtake Tesla as the world’s biggest producer of electric vehicles.
“We will have the products, the battery cell capacity and the vehicle-assembly capacity to be the EV leader by mid-decade,” GM CEO Mary Barra said in a statement, as cited by CNBC.
The investment will include $2.6 billion for the construction of a new battery plant in partnership with LG Energy Solution and $4 billion for converting GM’s existing Orion Assembly plant in Detroit to produce electric trucks, like the recently announced and highly anticipated Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, scheduled for launch in 2024.
The announced funds also represent a part of GM’s $35 billion agenda to increase its North American production capacity to 1 million electric vehicles by 2025. The carmaker forecasts it may beat rival EV producer Tesla as the top US-based seller of electric vehicles by that time.
The company also pledged to invest an additional $510 million to upgrade two of its non-electric vehicle assembly plants in Michigan.
“Michigan will be the recognized hub and leader of innovation in the US for EV R&D and manufacturing,” the company’s president, Mark Reuss, said during a media briefing.
GM is also converting its plants in Tennessee, Canada, and Mexico to assemble EVs, projecting that by 2030 half of its North American plants will be focused solely on EV production.
The car company has a long and bumpy road ahead, however, if it plans to topple Tesla as the top EV producer. Elon Musk’s EV giant delivered 936,172 electric vehicles globally last year. According to some estimations, Tesla’s 2021 US deliveries were well over 300,000 EVs, while GM sold less than 25,000 units, ranking third after Ford with 27,140 Mustang Mach-E EVs sold.
Bitcoin’s sharp sell-off is reminiscent of the great crypto crash of 2018
The dramatic sell-off of digital coins that saw Bitcoin drop below $34,000 and erased more than $1.4 trillion of the entire crypto market’s value since November has raised investor concerns that the worst is yet to come. They are now talking about the possibility of a “crypto winter,” referring to historic bear markets in the digital currency space.
The most recent such occurrence happened in late 2017 and early 2018 when, after an unprecedented boom, Bitcoin crashed by more than 80% to as low as $3,100, and didn’t reach a new high until December 2020. That so-called ‘Great crypto crash’ was worse than the Dot-com bubble’s 78% collapse in March 2000.
“It’s during crypto winters that the best entrepreneurs build the better companies. This is the time again to focus on solving real problems vs. pumping tokens,” the former head of crypto at Facebook-parent Meta, David Marcus, tweeted on Monday.
The crypto collapse raised concerns that the pain may persist for many months, according to UBS. “There’s this question of how do we characterize that and the nearest analogy is probably 2018, which is this idea of a crypto winter,” James Malcolm, head of foreign exchange research at UBS, told Fortune. “It looks likely to be a fairly difficult and potentially prolonged period and therefore, the crypto winter analogy is quite good,” he said, adding, “Remember, the crypto winter in 2018 wasn’t just over the Northern Hemisphere winter months. It basically extended for a whole year—so it was a crypto winter that lasted effectively a year.”
Analysts point out that the digital assets’ slump seems to be tracking broader market developments, in particular, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes’ slide into correction territory last week. Cryptocurrencies are becoming more intertwined with traditional markets due to involvement from large institutional funds, they say. The crypto market has been plummeting since the Federal Reserve announced that it would reduce its stimulus to the financial markets.
The largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, sunk to its lowest price in six months at the start of this week to near $33,000 after it went into a nosedive on Friday with cryptos across the board plummeting in value. Ether has more than halved in value since reaching its peak in November, while Solana has suffered an even steeper decline, falling 65%. They have bounced back since then, with Bitcoin up by more than 4% to around $38,000 a token on Wednesday.
The international oil benchmark soared above $90 amid low output and tension in Eastern Europe
The price of a barrel of crude oil reached $90 on Wednesday, a level unseen since October 2014. It’s the second seven-year record in a week, and insiders are predicting $100 oil by the year’s end, the rise fueled by tight supply and the threat of war in Ukraine.
After closing at $88.20 on Tuesday, the Brent crude price climbed to $90.08 by late Wednesday morning, an increase of more than 2%. The US West Texas Intermediate benchmark was also up by 2.2%, sitting at $87.50 at time of writing.
The last time Brent spiked above $90 was in October 2014. Last week, the oil benchmark also hit a seven-year high, with that spike driven by hostilities in the United Arab Emirates.
The latest surge comes as the oil-producing OPEC nations slowly increase their output to pre-pandemic levels. However, these producers have not scaled up their spare capacity to buffer against future disruptions, and prices in turn have shown no sign of falling. Moreover, the US is lagging behind its record daily production by around a million barrels, per Reuters, and Russia is increasing its production at a slower rate than expected.
Further complicating matters is the simmering tension over Ukraine, with Washington refusing to drop its demand that Ukraine be allowed to join the NATO alliance and Moscow sticking by its long-held position that a NATO state on its borders would be unacceptable.
All in all, the combination of market and geopolitical factors has led Goldman Sachs to predict an oil price of more than $100 by the third quarter of this year. The all-time highest oil price ever recorded was $143, in mid-2008.
Cybercriminals reportedly laundered over $8 billion last year, turning to high-tech protocols for illicit activity
Money laundering using cryptocurrencies surged 30% last year against 2020, with at least $8.6 billion in digital tokens lost in various illicit schemes, according to a new report from crypto analysis firm Chainalysis, released on Wednesday. Money laundering is a process in which the source of stolen funds is disguised by transferring it to a legitimate business.
Overall, over $33 billion worth of crypto has been laundered since 2017, the firm estimated. Most of that money was moved through centralized exchanges – however, in 2021, cybercriminals turned to more technologically advanced decentralized finance (DeFi) applications which facilitate crypto-denominated transactions outside of traditional banks – 17% of the total was laundered through DeFi in 2021, up from only 2% in 2020.
Analysts say the surge in money laundering cases did not come as a surprise amid the notable growth of both legitimate and illegal crypto activity in 2021. According to the report, crypto mining pools, high-risk exchanges, and mixers also reported a rise in funds received from wallets tied to criminal activity last year. Mixers, for instance, are used to mix illegally obtained crypto funds with others, which helps hide the funds’ original source.
Analysts noted, however, that the figures they gave for 2021 represent only the funds laundered from “crypto-native” crime, like sales on the darknet or ransomware attacks. Payments there are made in crypto, not exchanged from fiat currencies. However, the real figures involving criminal payments laundered in crypto could be much greater.
“It’s more difficult to measure how much fiat currency derived from off-line crime – traditional drug trafficking, for example – is converted into [crypto] to be laundered. However, we know anecdotally this is happening,” Chainalysis said.
Analysts expect a further rise in crypto crimes this year. According to Kim Grauer, Chainalysis’ director of research, 2022 “is already off to a big start for NFT (non-fungible tokens)” crimes.
Businesses may soon be able to accept contactless payments directly on their iPhones
Apple is working on a new feature that will allow businesses to accept payments on their iPhones without extra hardware, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing sources.
Small businesses, like cafes or flower shops, that don’t use traditional payment terminals but use their Apple smartphones as such, currently require external hardware to accept payments, such as Square’s.
This may no longer be the case. Apple has reportedly been working on a new feature that would let its smartphones accept payments with the tap of a credit card since around 2020, when the company acquired a Canadian startup called Mobeewave.
The startup made headlines when it worked with Samsung on a similar feature, called Samsung POS. The system launched worldwide in 2019, allowing Samsung smartphones to accept payments directly from physical cards, digital wallets, and even smartwatches.
Like Samsung POS, Apple’s new feature is likely to use existing technology – the near field communications (NFC) chip, which enables digital wallets like Apple Pay.
If this is the case, the new service will be made available via a mere software update on all iPhone models that have the chip (iPhone 6 and all newer versions).
Bloomberg sources say the feature is coming in a matter of months, perhaps even with the next iOS 15.4 update.
However, there is no information on whether Apple will use its own payment network to service the system or partner with an outside provider.
