Trillions erased, exchanges hacked: markets and crypto's brutal week

Wall Street took a beating. More than $3.4 trillion got wiped off US stocks in a single session, and Japan's Nikkei 225 officially slid into a bear market. Jim Cramer told investors the market is about to boom, while Bill Ackman called it a casino. Both calls landed in WatcherGuru's weekly recap.

Hackers had a field day. Brazil's biggest crypto exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, halted transactions after a $40 million breach. Binance said attackers got in by duping an employee with a fake job interview, and it's still fighting claims tied to a $6.3 billion hack that North Korea denies. North Korean hackers have now grabbed $12.8 billion in crypto since 2017, the US Treasury cut exchange MEXC off from the US financial system, and outages knocked 128 Japanese credit unions offline, blocking withdrawals.

The political ground shifted underneath all of it. According to WatcherGuru's recap, Democrats won the House and Senate, and they're already moving to remove Trump's tariffs on Canada and to block his $1.5 trillion military budget. They also plan to dig into the crypto industry's financial ties to the president. Elizabeth Warren is expected to chair the Senate Banking Committee, and Senate Democrats want to examine JPMorgan's Epstein connections.

Two more flashpoints from the recap: US intelligence says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a relationship with a Chinese spy, and Trump promised to shield Elon Musk from Democratic threats against Tesla and SpaceX. A Democratic lawmaker is also calling for an immediate ban on superintelligent AI.

Crypto kept elbowing into traditional finance. Morgan Stanley tokenized $10 trillion in US stocks and bonds, per the recap. Coinbase's Bitcoin stash now sits at 18,000 BTC, worth $1.4 billion. Russia cleared Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT trading for retail investors, South Korea pushed crypto taxes out to 2029 and is weighing a 99% cold-storage rule, New Jersey dropped its Coinbase lawsuit so staking can resume, Stripe switched on stablecoin payments across more than 160 markets, and Amundi launched a tokenized equity index fund on Ethereum.

What's coming next: the CFTC approved perpetual futures on individual US stocks, Hyperliquid is chasing US approval for the same, and crypto investing through 401(k) plans has landed at the White House for review. CZ argues banks may be more vulnerable to cyberattacks than crypto exchanges, and Michael Saylor says bipartisan support for Bitcoin reserves is growing. Elsewhere, Paraguay's president resigned after the country's largest bank collapsed, and Anthropic reportedly plans a $1.5 trillion IPO before Thanksgiving.