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he SEC shook the blockchain community last week when it issued a report ruling that the $50 million worth of tokens that were stolen last summer as part of a hack on the DAO were securities and should’ve been registered with the SEC. The DAO was a decentralized platform for investing in Ethereum-focused startups that was essentially an early version of the now popular Initial Coin Offerings. The report will likely slow the pace of new ICOs, as fledging company’s comprising a couple of ambitious engineers figure out how, exactly, to go about registering their projects.

In addition to the Chinese Caixin Manufacturing PMI due out shortly, which will either confirm or deny Sunday's modest decline in the official Mfg PMI, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) decision (due at 2:30pm Sydney time) headlines the region’s risk events this week.

Two weeks ago, when discussing the troubles plaguing one of China's conglomerates and "boldest dealmaker", HNA Group - recently best known for acquiring Anthony Scaramucci's SkyBridge capital in a transaction that has yet to close - we said that what until recently was one of the world's most aggressive roll-ups of varied companies from around the globe, including stakes in Hilton Companies and Deutsche Bank, as well as countless Chinese acquisitions, could very soon become the "reverse roll-up from hell", as the stock price of HNA tumbled, putting the roughly $24 billion in loans that had

For only the third time since Lehman, the price of liquidity in the Hong Kong Dollar interbank markets has exploded higher.

Overnight HKD Hibor soared over 60 basis points to 0.71407% in Monday trading - the highest since October 2008...

Note that the two previous spikes were around year-end, so this is unusual in both its velocity and size.

During his January 2014 State of the Union address Obama announced the creation of a new financial product that would allow American workers, those without access to retirement accounts anyway, to directly participate in the U.S. Treasury's debt ponzi on a tax-deferred basis.  The accounts were cleverly named MyRA and were intended to be a substitute for people who didn't have access to an employee-sponsored 401k...with one little catch...money deposited in the accounts could only be invested in U.S. government bonds.  Here's an excerpt from Obama's speech at the time: