Morning Minute: CPI Comes In Hot; Stocks, Crypto Shrug

GM!

Today’s top news:

The April CPI print dropped Tuesday morning and delivered the wrong news for rate cut hopes.

Headline inflation rose 0.6% for the month, putting the 12-month rate at 3.8%, the highest since May 2023. Core CPI, excluding food and energy, increased 0.4% monthly and 2.8% annually, above the 2.7% consensus on both fronts. Real average hourly wages slipped 0.5% for the month and fell 0.3% annually, meaning workers are getting paid more nominally but losing ground in real terms. That’s the stagflation concern: high inflation, slowing real income, and a central bank that can’t cut.

Clearly the Iran War and oil are a big driver. Energy costs jumped 17.9% year-over-year, the steepest annual increase since September 2022, driven by gasoline up 28.4% and fuel oil up 54.3%.

This all comes as Kevin Warsh takes over the Federal Reserve from Jerome Powell on Friday. Odds of a rate hike in 2026 (hike, not cut) jumped to 30% after the CPI print, up from just 1% a month ago. So hikes are much more on the table than cuts.

As for Warsh, he inherits a Fed that cannot cut, an economy with 3.8% inflation, oil still above $100, and rising stagflation concerns. He will have his work cut out for him…

The text landed without major surprises. The core provisions include:

Notably missing from the 309-page draft is any mention of Ethics provisions, resulting from the Trump family crypto dealings. Without those provisions, many Democrats believe the bill is dead on arrival.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) remains publicly uncommitted, and all 13 Republican votes are needed for the committee to advance the bill. Major US labor unions including SEIU, AFT, NEA, and AFSCME sent a joint letter to the Senate demanding the bill be rejected, arguing it could create risks for worker pension programs.

As of this morning, over 100 amendments have already been filed for review ahead of the Thursday markup—another sign that this is far from a done deal in its current state.

Citi analysts have tied their $143,000 BTC base-case target for 2026 directly to Clarity Act passage, projecting an additional $15 billion in net ETF inflows once the bill clears Congress. If it doesn’t pass, well, those targets will need to be re-evaluated.

The fund invests exclusively in short-term US Treasuries, cash, and overnight repo agreements backed by government securities. The fund will be powered by JPMorgan’s Kinexys Digital Assets unit, creating a permissioned system that sits on top of public Ethereum as its base layer.

It’s JPMorgan’s second tokenized money market product (its MONY fund launched on Ethereum in December 2025), but JLTXX is specifically structured around the stablecoin reserve use case rather than general institutional liquidity management. The filing puts JPMorgan directly in competition with BlackRock’s Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, filed the same week, and Morgan Stanley’s MSNXX fund, which launched last month targeting the same institutional stablecoin reserve market. The three largest financial institutions in the world are all racing to become the Treasury yield infrastructure layer for a $320 billion stablecoin market growing 28% annually.

The RWA market has grown 200% year-over-year to $30 billion. Expect that growth to continue.

Blind signing is the practice of approving hexadecimal data without understanding what it actually does. When users approve Ethereum transactions, they currently see “low-level, machine-readable formats that are accurate but difficult to interpret without technical expertise.” Attackers exploit this by making malicious approvals look identical to legitimate ones at the point of signing.

The $1.5B Bybit exploit, the $235M WazirX breach, and the CoW DAO domain hijacking this month all followed the same playbook: get a user or multisig signer to approve a transaction whose true intent was hidden. That gets much harder to pull off with clear signing.

The working group includes Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, WalletConnect, and Fireblocks. Trezor CTO Tomáš Sušánka: “This addresses a fundamental vulnerability that has plagued cryptocurrency users for years: blind signing. When users can’t understand what they’re signing, security becomes much more difficult. This standard changes that, and every wallet provider should embrace it.”