Hello and welcome to another week of Overbit News, where we cover the top stories in the global financial worlds. Our two reports of the day are in stark contrast to each other. On the one hand, US Investors are estimated to commit $40b in newly printed stimulus money into Crypto, according to a recent survey, while India plans another crypto ban.
According to a recent survey conducted by Mizuho Securities on Monday, 10%, or approximately $40 billion, of the $380 billion in direct stimulus cheques could be used to buy Bitcoin and Stocks. Mizuho managing director Dan Dolev and his team surveyed approximately 235 people with a household income of less than $150,000.
According to the study, nearly two-in-five cheque recipients plan to spend some portion of their cheques on investments, and stimulus cheque recipients prefer Bitcoin over stocks, according to Mizuho Securities. “The survey predicts that Bitcoin will account for 60% of total incremental investment spend. We calculate it could add as much as 2-3% to bitcoin’s current $1.1t trillion market value,” Dolev writes.
In addition to Mizuho’s survey, Goldman Sachs says a good chunk of the new stimulus money that is about to be funnelled into American households shortly, via the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, may find its way into the stock market.
“We expect households will be the largest source of equity demand this year,” Goldman’s chief U.S. equity strategist David Kostin wrote recently. As Crypto investments seem to be heating up in the US, let’s head into our next story of the week and the proposed India crypto ban.
In what seems like a merry-go-round headline, once again, the world is met with news of India planning to ban cryptocurrency. Similar to China, stories of both of these countries’ banning’ cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are almost as old as the sector itself, with them coming up every so often throughout the last decade.
The most recent was three years back when the Reserve Bank of India banned banks from doing business with any company in the cryptocurrency industry. Though the law was struck down in 2020 by India’s supreme court, it seems it has come back with a vengeance this time around, setting its sight on private citizens. The bill would make it illegal and penalize anyone buying, selling, transacting in or mining bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, effectively making all interaction with cryptocurrency illegal.
Though this is rightfully a call for concern, it seems investors in India are unfazed. “[D]espite government threats of a ban, transaction volumes are swelling and 8 million investors now hold 100 billion rupees ($1.4 billion) in crypto-investments, according to industry estimates,” reports Reuters. The retail side seems equally unmoved, with the leading p2p site LocalBitcoins reporting a steady $1.5 million weekly volume since the announcement. Though it may be sometimes left out of the cryptocurrency conversation, it certainly seems India will be one of the major players in the future.
They boast one of the world’s most significant (and growing) populations, as well as one a society that primarily values holding physical gold; couple these two factors with an antagonistic government and the global wave of cryptocurrency taking the world by storm, and it seems that India could be a hotbed for cryptocurrency revolution.
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