Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was last seen two weeks ago entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. 

As a Saudi Journalist, his visit to the consulate was rather routine. However, what happened next is a matter of much debate. The Saudi Saudi Arabian authorities claim that he left out the back door, but other's claim that he was tortured and cut into small pieces.

By now, Khashoggi's disappearance has become a geopolitical hot-button. Trump says that if the Saudi's are indeed responsible there will be consequences. The Saudis have hinted that any such consequences may just backfire on their global partners. The price of crude oil is particularly in question at the moment.

Though we hope for a quick and peaceful resolution, we must remain alert.

Today's Highlights

• Lots of Bad News
• US Dollar in Trouble
• Tether Breakdown

Traditional Markets

Between the situation in the Middle East, the election results from South East Germany, and the budget proposal expected from Italy today, there's not a lot of good news out there for the markets to grab onto. 

Stocks are getting hammered throughout Asia and Europe as investors seek safety in the Japanese Yen and precious metals.

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It is interesting to note that even though there is a clear feeling of tension, the US Dollar is not acting as a safe haven and is even losing ground against the emerging markets currencies this morning.

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Of course, the US Dollar, as the global reserve currency is usually one of the most stable. 

Not so Stable Coin

We have a bit of a situation in the crypto market as well this morning....

There's been a lot of talk about stable coins lately and how they work. This as the number of stable coins in circulation is rising rapidly.

Generally speaking, the more stable coins we see in the ecosystem the more stable it is as people can evaluate each one on its own merits and we see more diversity in the markets.

The issue at hand is that the first stable coin, known as Tether or USDT seems to have lost some of its credibility. Within the last few hours, USDT has been seeing some abnormal price action across exchanges.

Even though Tether is designed to keep a steady exchange rate of $1 per coin, this morning it has seen prices as low as $0.85 before recovering and is trading on most exchanges around $0.95 at the time of writing.

During the confusion, many cryptotraders who were holding USDT in their accounts decided to protect themselves by placing their money into other cryptoassets in the meantime. Hence the spikes we saw this morning in Bitcoin, Etherum, XRP, and many others.

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