S&P’s Dan Yergin warns of ‘dangerous time’ for global economy as Middle East tensions fester
The global economy is entering a “dangerous time” like never before as Middle East tensions remain elevated, said S&P Global’s vice chairman Daniel Yergin.
Since the Israel-Hamas conflict began on Oct. 7 of last year, the oil market has experienced minimal disruptions, with prices remaining under pressure as a result of increased U.S. production and weak demand from China. However, this sentiment has been shifting. Oil prices spiked last week on fears that Israel could target Iran’s oil industry in retaliation for Tehran’s ballistic missile attack, with industry analysts raising concerns about a genuine threat to supply.
“The Israelis have not concluded what they’re going to do in terms of a strike — that’s under discussion,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters at a White House press briefing last week, adding that he discouraged Israel from striking Iranian oil facilities.
Last week, both oil benchmarks saw their biggest weekly gain since March 2023. During Asia trading on Tuesday, global benchmark Brent slipped 1.77% to $79.50 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate traded 1.83% lower at $75.77 per barrel.
Yergin told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” that he expects Israeli retaliation will not just be a replay of last April, but something “much stronger.”
In April, Iran and Israel came to blows but ultimately avoided a full-scale war. Iran fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for an attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria.
When asked if the global economy is on the precipice of another supply shock resulting from Middle East tensions, Yergin said it’s a precarious time for markets.
“I think it’s a very dangerous time, one that we haven’t seen,” he said.
Additionally, while Yergin maintained that it is not certain whether Iranians have operational nuclear weapons, that is still “certainly in the backdrop,” particularly through the lens of the Israelis.
“The betting is that the Israelis would not attack, try to attack, the nuclear facilities at this time. But a few months from now, a few weeks from now, whatever it is, Iran would have the capacity — it’s thought — to deliver a nuclear weapon, and that raises the stakes,” he said, likening the moment to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
That said, Israel is a lot more concerned about Iran’s nuclear facilities than the Iranian oil industry, said Pavel Molchanov, managing director of investment services firm Raymond James. Iran’s nuclear program has progressed to a stage where, in approximately one week, the country could potentially enrich enough uranium for five fission weapons, according to estimates by Iran Watch, a website published by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
“The worst-case scenario would be something that Iran can do on its own, which is a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. So this is not directly related to Israeli airstrikes or missiles.
The strait, between Oman and Iran, is a vital channel where about one fifth of global oil production flows daily, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It is a strategically important waterway linking crude producers in the Middle East with key markets across the world.
The inability of oil to traverse through the strait, even temporarily, can increase shipping costs, lead to considerable supply delays and ratchet up global energy prices, with some surmising that a worst-case scenario could prompt oil prices to surge above $100 a barrel.
Environment
Senate passes GENIUS stablecoin bill, giving crypto industry first major legislative win
The World Liberty Financial website arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Senate on Tuesday passed the GENIUS Act, a landmark bill that for the first time establishes federal guardrails for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins and creates a regulated pathway for private companies to issue digital dollars with the blessing of the federal government.
The bill passed with a 68-30 vote.
It’s a milestone day for the crypto industry, which put around $250 million into the 2024 cycle to elect what’s now considered to be the most pro-crypto Congress in U.S. history, and for President Donald Trump‘s sprawling digital asset empire.
“The GENIUS Act will protect consumers, enable responsible innovation, and safeguard the dominance of the U.S. dollar,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., one of the sponsors of the bill, in a statement.
The bill still faces hurdles in the Republican-held House, but passage in the Senate signals a turning point — not just for the technology, but for the political clout behind it.
The GENIUS Act, short for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, sets guardrails for the industry, including full reserve backing, monthly audits, and anti-money laundering compliance.
It also opens the door to a broader range of issuers, including banks, fintechs, and major retailers looking to launch their own stablecoins or integrate them into existing payment systems.
The legislation grants sweeping authority to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who last week told a Senate appropriations subcommittee in a hearing that the U.S. stablecoin market could grow nearly eightfold to over $2 trillion in the next few years.
The bill’s passage drew sharp criticism from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who accused Republicans of “rubberstamping Trump’s crypto corruption,” and allowing the president to sell “access to the government for personal profit.”
Merkley had pushed for an amendment to bar elected officials from personally profiting off digital assets, but said GOP lawmakers blocked all efforts to hold a floor vote.
In May, Senate Democrats unveiled the “End Crypto Corruption Act,” spearheaded by Merkley and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, meant to prohibit elected officials and senior executive branch personnel and their families from issuing or endorsing digital assets.
GENIUS now heads to the House, which has its own version of a stablecoin bill dubbed STABLE. Both prohibit yield-bearing consumer stablecoins — but diverge on who regulates what.
The Senate’s version centralizes oversight with Treasury, while the House splits authority between the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency, and others. Reconciling the two could take a while, according to congressional aides.
The GENIUS Act was supposed to be the easiest crypto bill to pass, but took months to reach the Senate floor, failed once, and passed only after fierce negotiations.
“We thought it would be easiest to start with stablecoins,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said on stage in Las Vegas at this year’s Bitcoin 2025 conference, which focused heavily on stablecoins.
“It has been extremely difficult. I had no idea how hard this was going to be,” she said.
At the same event, Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., echoed the frustration: “It has been murder to get them there,” he said of the 18 Senate Democrats who ultimately crossed the aisle.
Disrupting legacy rails
Stablecoins are a subset of cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of real-world assets. About 99% of all stablecoins are tethered to the price of the U.S. dollar.
They offer instant settlement and lower transaction fees, cutting out the middlemen and directly threatening legacy payment rails.
Shopify has already rolled out USDC-powered payments through Coinbase and Stripe. Bank of America‘s CEO said last week at a Morgan Stanley conference that the bank is having conversations with the industry and individually exploring stablecoin issuance.
Deutsche Bank found that stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year, surpassing that of Mastercard and Visa, combined.
Still, there are limits. The GENIUS Act restricts non-financial large tech companies from directly issuing stablecoins unless they establish or partner with regulated financial entities — a provision meant to blunt monopoly concerns.
JPMorgan Chase, meanwhile, is taking a different route, launching JPMD, a deposit token designed to function like a stablecoin but tightly integrated with the traditional banking system.
Issued on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, JPMD is only available to institutional clients and offers features like 24/7 settlement and interest payments — part of the broader push by legacy finance to adapt to the stablecoin era without ceding ground to crypto-native firms.
Trump’s stake
While Democrats tried to amend the bill to prevent the president from profiting off crypto ventures, the final legislation only bars members of Congress and their families from doing so.
Trump’s first financial disclosure as president, released Friday, revealed he earned at least $57 million in 2024 alone from token sales tied to World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform closely aligned with his political brand.
He holds nearly 16 billion WLFI governance tokens — the crypto equivalent of voting shares — which could be worth close to $1 billion on paper, based on prior private sales.
That’s just one slice of the Trump crypto pie.
The family’s ventures, which include the controversial $TRUMP meme coin, a $2.5 billion bitcoin Treasury and proposed bitcoin and ether ETFs via Truth.Fi, and a newly launched mining firm called American Bitcoin, reflect an aggressive push into digital finance.
Forbes recently estimated Trump’s crypto holdings at nearly $1 billion, lifting his total net worth to $5.6 billion.
Environment
BYD begins delivering its first luxury electric super sedan just as Ferrari delays a new EV
While Ferrari is pushing back EV plans, BYD is stepping in with its first luxury electric super sedan. BYD kicked off deliveries of the Yangwang U7, a four-motor, flagship electric sedan powerhouse packing nearly 1,300 horsepower.
BYD has a new luxury EV sports sedan to beat Ferrari
Although it was due out next year, Ferrari is delaying plans for its second EV for at least another two years. Two sources close to the matter told Reuters that the decision is due to sluggish demand for EV sports cars.
One source claimed that “real, sustainable demand is non-existent for an electric sports car” and that Ferrari’s second EV is not expected to arrive before 2028.
Meanwhile, BYD officially kicked off deliveries of the Yangwang U7 this month, its first electric luxury super sedan.
Packing four electric motors, the Yangwang U7 delivers up to 1,287 horsepower (960 kW), good for a 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) sprint in just 2.9 seconds. It also includes a massive 135.5 kWh battery, providing a CLTC range of nearly 450 miles (720 km).
BYD’s flagship electric sedan is just as smart as it is powerful. The Yangwang U7 features BYD’s “God’s Eye A” ADAS system, which incorporates three Lidars, five radars, 13 high-definition cameras, and 12 ultrasonic radars.
The system offers smart driving and safety features, including Navigate on Autopilot (NOA) for city and highway use, automated parking, and more.
The interior is centered around a “Star Ring Cockpit” design with BYD’s DiLink smart cockpit system and DeepSeek AI. You can see that there is plenty of screen space, featuring a 12.8″ curved center display and a 23″ driver display. Front and rear passengers get added 6″ entertainment screens.
Like other vehicles under BYD’s luxury Yangwang brand, the U7 features its Disus-Z suspension system, enabling it to “dance” and even jump over things on the road.
The U7 is 5,265 mm in length, 1,998 mm in width, and 1,517 mm in height, which is slightly larger than the Porsche Panamera.
BYD’s luxury EV sedan starts at just 628,000 yuan, or about $87,000 in China. The four-seater variant costs 708,000 yuan, or roughly $98,500, which is still about half the cost of the most affordable Ferrari.
Ferrari still plans to launch its first fully electric vehicle during its Capital Markets Day on October 9, with deliveries kicking off the same month. We got a sneak peek of Ferrari’s first EV earlier this year, after it was spotted in public with a crossover-like design.
According to the sources, the second EV will be more of a high-volume model, with Ferrari planning to deliver around 5,000 to 6,000 units over five years, similar to its typical models.
Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle won’t be cheap. It’s expected to cost at least 500,000 euros, or over $500,000.
Electrek’s Take
Will BYD’s new Yangwang U7 prove that Ferrari is wrong that luxury EV sports cars don’t sell? Several Chinese EV makers are already proving it, such as Xiaomi, which sold over 200,000 SU7 models in under a year.
In April, BYD’s ultra-luxury Yangwang brand delivered its 10,000th vehicle, following the launch of its first model, the U8, in September 2023.
Yangwang sold 139 vehicles in May, including 22 U7s, 12 U9 electric supercars, and 94 U8 SUVs. As more sales data is released, we will see if Ferrari’s theory that demand for an electric luxury sports car is “non-existent.”
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EV charger operating system manufacturer ChargeLab just launched OpenOCPP, a free and open-source software stack that could majorly simplify life for EV charger manufacturers.
OpenOCPP is the first hardware-agnostic, pre-certified embedded software stack supporting OCPP 1.6J and 2.0.1. In plain terms, it helps EV chargers speak the same language as charging station management systems (CSMS) – and it works across just about any hardware setup, from a lightweight ESP32 microcontroller to a full Linux embedded system.
Right now, most EV charger companies have to spend big on building and certifying their own firmware to support OCPP. That takes 18 to 24 months, slows down rollout, and clogs up innovation. With OpenOCPP, ChargeLab says the timeline shrinks to just a few weeks.
“We’ve designed an incredibly memory-efficient embedded software stack that can run on any underlying hardware,” said ChargeLab CTO Ehsan Mokthari, who also co-chairs the Open Charge Alliance’s OCPP 2.lite working group. “OpenOCPP also comes with enterprise-grade security pre-built, so manufacturers can get up and running quickly.”
ChargeLab is a member of the Open Charge Alliance (OCA), the group behind OCPP. OpenOCPP is being added to the OCA Validation Test Bed, which helps companies verify that their products conform to OCPP standards.
OpenOCPP brings a lot to the table for EV charger makers. It comes with built-in security that meets OCPP 2.0.1’s toughest standards. It doesn’t lock manufacturers into any one provider – it works with ChargeLab’s CSMS or any other backend that supports OCPP. It passes the OCA’s conformance test tool right out of the box and is ready for California’s CTEP requirements. It’s designed to run on microcontrollers with as little as 4MB of memory. And thanks to its modular design and open-source Apache 2.0 license, it’s ready for whatever OCPP throws at the industry next.
One company already using OpenOCPP is FractalEV, a North American Level 2 EV charger manufacturer. They’ve installed units using a beta version of the software across over 20 CSMS platforms.
“ChargeLab’s embedded software stack helped us launch faster,” said FractalEV founder Chris Mendes. “With OpenOCPP going open source, there is really no reason to look elsewhere for an OCPP communication stack.”
OpenOCPP is already running on over 4,000 chargers through manufacturer beta programs, many deployed by major corporate customers with tight cybersecurity standards. As OpenOCPP exits beta today, ChargeLab invites more manufacturers and developers to the project.
Read more: With a $30M raise, SparkCharge takes EV fleet charging off-grid
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