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After slowing down fractionally in its relentless ascent after topping $11,000 for the first time less than a week ago, Bitcoin has brushed off the weekend selloff and on Wednesday morning (Asian time) exploded higher following a renewed burst of buying out of the usual Asian suspect exchanges - and Bitfinex - surging above $12,000 for the first time ever, and trading at a new all time high of $12,200 at publication time.

For those keeping track, this is how long it has taken the cryptocurrency to cross the key psychological levels:

The US Dollar is down over 9% year-to-date against a broad basket of the world's fiat currencies, tumbled over 10% against gold, and has collapsed against Bitcoin; but, as Bloomberg's Garfield Reynolds warns, the dollar's worst year since 2003 is about to get "even grimmer" in 2018...

Via Bloomberg,

The one point of clarity coming out of Washington is that tax reform isn’t about to save the dollar where Fed rate hikes have failed.

Authored by Patrick Watson via MauldinEconomics.com,

According to the more cynical pundits, government programs usually achieve the opposite of their intended goal. And sometimes they do.

For example, Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” is still in progress, but the drugs are definitely winning.

One lesson from the 2007-08 crisis was that the vast majority of financial market participants, never mind the general public, were unfamiliar with subprime mortgages until the crisis was underway. Even now, we doubt many have much understanding of repo, the divergence between LIBOR and Fed Funds from 9 August 2007 and Eurodollar liquidity.

One wonders if the Fed ever reads the reports issued by the Office of Financial Stability, which does a surprisingly good job of laying out the risks facing the market at any one time, which incidentally are far greater than various Fed presidents would care to admit.