Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk. Here is your Friday briefing.
Stock futures are under pressure this morning as Wall Street extends Thursday's pain, with the S and P five hundred and Nasdaq dragged lower by a broad tech and AI-related selloff. The Dow managed to close mixed on Thursday, but futures suggest the selling isn't finished, and rising oil prices are adding another layer of cost pressure to an already nervous tape.
Shifting to financial regulation, a significant integrity question is emerging around prediction market operator Kalshi. Polling firm Wedgewood admitted it fabricated the majority of its election surveys, and the aggregator VoteHub, which carried those results, is named in Kalshi's own regulatory filings as the underlying data source for recurring contracts. That means traders may have been pricing risk against manufactured numbers, and the mechanism for recourse remains deeply unclear.
Meanwhile, HSBC has entered the stablecoin arena with the launch of RedCoin, its first publicly available stablecoin. The move signals that major global banks are no longer treating digital currencies as peripheral experiments. For traditional finance, this is a meaningful line crossed, bringing institutional balance sheet credibility directly into the stablecoin market.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
