First Republic Bank shares have been hit hard over the past week following the failures of two large U.S. regional banks,

Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. On Thursday, shares of the bank and many other financial firms rallied after The Wall Street Journal reported that the biggest U.S. banks are discussing a joint rescue of the San Francisco lender. Under the plan, 11 banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. would place $30 billion in deposits at First Republic, using their own funds.

First Republic was one of the banks to be swept up in the contagion that followed the March 10 failure of SVB Financial Corp., the parent of Silicon Valley Bank, because of some similarities including their size, their largely wealthy client base and the largely uninsured nature of their deposit bases.

Homeowners and businesses across the country have seen their gas bills go wild—and

the turbulence isn’t going to calm down anytime soon.

Last year was the most volatile on record for natural gas, boosting the cost to heat homes, generate electricity and manufacture economic building blocks such as fertilizer and steel. Prices in 2022 whipsawed from unseasonable lows to shale-era highs and back again. Benchmark gas futures, which determine what millions of Americans pay for heat and electricity, swung by at least 7% on 44 days last year, the most since at least the early 1990s, when gas markets were deregulated and the modern trading era began. 

Turmoil in the banking sector sparked a furious rally in government bonds Monday, with yields on some shorter-term Treasurys collapsing half a percentage point in hours.

Yields, which fall when bond prices rise, started falling during the Asia trading session soon after U.S. regulators, including the Federal Reserve,

announced measures on Sunday night intended to mute the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s sudden collapse on Friday. They then took another nosedive when trading opened in Europe and continued to slide at the start of U.S. trading, while stock indexes wavered.

In late 2018, the companies behind the most widely traded cryptocurrency were struggling to maintain their access to the global banking system. Some of their backers turned to shadowy intermediaries, falsified documents and shell companies to get back in, documents show.

One of those intermediaries, a major tether trader in China, was trying to “circumvent the banking system by providing fake sales invoices and contracts for each deposit and withdrawal,” Stephen Moore, one of the owners of Tether Holdings Ltd., said in an email viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The “Russia question,” what role the country’s fossil fuels might play in peacetime, may not be the most pressing issue for energy bosses and the investors backing them. But it is rightly on their minds.

The year since Russia invaded Ukraine has been a roller coaster for energy markets. Oil prices have been volatile, with the global Brent benchmark peaking at $133 a barrel in March before falling back around $80 today—below where they traded on the first day of the war. That is nothing compared with natural gas. After Moscow

cut pipeline supplies to Europe, the region’s benchmark TTF day-ahead gas price hit a level equivalent to almost $580 a barrel of oil in late August.

Wall Street is betting tens of millions of dollars on psychedelic drugs that backers say could treat mental illness for a fraction of what it costs to do therapy with better-known treatments.

Transcend Therapeutics Inc. raised $40 million from venture-capital investors in January to develop a post-traumatic stress disorder treatment that its 29-year-old CEO Blake Mandell says would require about half the amount of therapy as MDMA, or ecstasy, a popular hallucinogen. Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Lusaris Therapeutics Inc. have announced capital raises of about $100 million since November for similar products addressing depression. 

The DXY index, which measures the value of the dollar against a basket of other currencies, increased by 0.45% this week to 113.25 in advance of the weekend, helped along by a rise in U.S. Treasury rates in response to hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation statistics. Even though the annual core CPI went down from 6.3% to 6.6% in September, this is still a big increase and shows that price pressures in the economy are still high.

Even though the aggressive tightening cycle could cause a very bad recession, the Fed is likely to keep raising interest rates quickly in the coming months because inflation risks are leaning toward the upside. To be sure, policymakers appear to be emphasizing the price stability part of their job above the increasingly weakening growth profile.

For now, the “pivot theory” could be disproven if market participants discount a “more restrictive for longer” monetary policy stance and FOMC terminal rate expectations rise significantly above futures market levels. The U.S. dollar should profit from this scenario because it would maintain a positive skew in bond rates and increase the dollar’s “carry premium” relative to other major currencies.

Technically speaking, the DXY index is just below a major barrier of resistance close to 113.85. It gained ground on Friday. A break above this level in the coming sessions might signal a run for the multi-decade high at 114.77 and then 116.40, the top of a short-term rising wedge. If sellers come back and start a bearish reversal from current levels, the first support for bears is at 111.00/110.90. In the event of an additional decline, attention will turn to the 109.80 level.