Markets Desk, here's your midday read. Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the architect of Mexico's modern drug trade, has died at eighty. He united traffickers into the Guadalajara Cartel, building a multibillion-dollar business on political protection and violence, and his capture reshaped the underworld into the fractured, bloodier landscape Mexico knows today.
Turning to crypto, Bitcoin bounced from a four-month low near sixty-two thousand dollars, a move that triggered roughly two billion dollars in liquidations over a single twenty-four-hour stretch. Binance's Changpeng Zhao denied the exchange sold crypto into the slide, pushing back on claims that its own selling deepened the weekend rout.
And in corporate news, Noodles and Company is closing more than forty additional restaurants, shrinking its footprint to concentrate sales in the remaining stores. Management says average restaurant volume climbed over fifteen percent to one point five four million dollars, and the chain's chief executive calls that the pillar of the whole operating model.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
