The company reported a third-quarter loss of $62.5 million, or 8 cents a share, compared with $22.9 million, or 3 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings, which exclude stock-based compensation expenses and other items, were 43 cents a share, compared with 25 cents a share in the year-ago period.

Revenue rose to $1.21 billion from $750.1 million in the year-ago quarter.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had forecast 38 cents a share on revenue of $1.15 billion.

Marvell forecast adjusted earnings of 45 cents to 51 cents a share on revenue of $1.28 billion to $1.36 billion for the fourth quarter. The forecast includes contributions from the company’s recent acquisition of Innovium Inc.

Analysts had estimated earnings of 42 cents a share on revenue of $1.21 billion for the fourth quarter.

Crypto in a snap

Bitcoin
BTCUSD,
-0.16%
tumbled this week amid omicron, the coronavirus variant first identified in the southern parts of Africa and has now been detected in the U.S. The cryptocurrency dropped about 2.8% over the past seven days, recently trading above $57,000 according to CoinDesk data. Ether
ETHUSD,
-0.58%
rose about 3.1% for the past seven days, recently trading above $4,500.

Dogecoin
DOGEUSD,
+1.97%
logged a 4.3% loss for the past seven days, while Shiba Inu, the coin created based on the dogecoin meme, notched a roughly 11% gain over the past seven days.

Crypto Metrics

Biggest Gainers	Price	% 7-day return
Terra	$64.8	53.1%
Stacks	$2.62	24.7%
Ankr	$0.14	16.7%
Siacoin	$0.023	10.8%
UNUS SED LEO	$3.35	8.04%
		Source: CoinMarketCap.com as of Dec.2

Biggest Decliners	Price	% 7-day return
WAX	$0.62	-24.2%
Harmony	$0.24	-23.6%
Enjin Coin	$3.38	-20.74%
Loopring	$2.66	-19.7%
loTeX	$0.15	-18.1%
		Source: CoinMarketCap.com as of Dec.2

Crypto banks? 

Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital, a digital asset platform that provides crypto custody, trading and staking for financial institutions, said he expects to see more banks providing crypto-related services in the coming years. In January, Anchorage Digital Bank became the first federally chartered bank for digital assets. 

“I think by the end of 2022, it’s going to be very obvious that every bank needs to become a crypto bank, because enough will have adopted” crypto, McCauley said.

“Your local bank branch, whether it’s a credit union or a large conglomerate bank, will very likely be offering some sort of crypto investment product,” according to McCauley. Such offerings will be driven by increasing retail demand, McCauley said. 

“And that’ll be regulatory clarity coming from Washington and from the States. It’s gonna be more obvious that banks are allowed to do that,” McCauley said. “And as long as they put in the right controls, work with the right partners, they’ll be able to build services of that nature.”

Meanwhile, Anchorage has seen growing institutional demand for blockchain gaming tokens such as Decentraland
MANAUSD,
-3.33%,
decentralized finance, or DeFi, tokens like Maker
MKRUSD,
-2.58%,
Uniswap
UNIUSD,
+7.92%,
and Sushiswap, and also non-fungible token, or NFT-related coins, such as NFTX. 

“The demand for those kinds of coins comes from buy-side investors who have a particular thesis on how web 3.0 will grow,” McCauley said. Web 3.0 refers to the next stage of Internet evolution. 

“Broadly, the way that we think about Web 3.0 now is that it’s going to be this kind of infinite game, where an infinite amount of advancement in technology happens across a broad range of different industries, and we’re just seeing the very beginning of that,” McCauley said.

Risky asset or inflation hedge? 

As bitcoin tends to move in the same direction as the stock market recently, the cryptocurrency has been trading more like a  risk-on asset, instead of a hedge against inflation, according to some analysts.

“I have never bought into the inflation hedge narrative.” Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at [currency] trading platform OANDA, told MarketWatch in a phone interview. “I just don’t see enough evidence. And I think having limited coins isn’t enough [for bitcoin] to be an inflation hedge and certainly not enough to be a safe haven.” 

“When we did see markets pricing a lot more inflation, especially because central banks are pushing back against raising rates, gold surged, and bitcoin jumped and then dropped again,” Erlam said. “I think that was a sign that in times of real need, the inflation hedge narrative starts to look a little bit misguided.”

Over the next month or so, omicron’s influence on global investors’ risk appetites and the governments’ reactions will likely have the greatest impact on bitcoin price, according to Erlam.  “If we see that omicron is vaccine-resistant, it’s far more violent and it’s far more transmissible, then I think we’re gonna see significant risk aversion in the markets.” In that scenario, bitcoin’s price “could be hit quite hard,” Erlam said. 

Miner stocks 

Arcane Research’s mining index, which is composed of 15 of the largest publicly listed mining companies and weighted by market cap, has gained 197% so far in 2021, surpassing the 95% gain of bitcoin, according to a Tuesday report. 

Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital is so far the best performer in 2021 among all crypto miner stocks, with a gain of more than 350% year-to-date, the report noted. 

However, “an investment in mining companies carries a much higher risk than an investment in bitcoin itself,” according to Arcane’s report. Bitcoin miner Bit Digital saw its shares decline 70% so far in 2021, as the company relocated its operations from China to North America after China started cracking down on crypto mining.

Similar trends play out in physical assets too, as shares of gold miners
GDX,
-1.20%
tend to see amplified moves, compared against underlying spot gold or gold futures
GC00,
-0.84%.

The crypto token called omicron? 

As the coronavirus variant omicron caught the world’s attention, a namesake cryptocurrency surged more than 900% from about $65 on Nov.27 to $692 on Nov. 29. The token Omicron is recently trading at around $322, according to CoinMarketCap.

The cryptocurrency isn’t related to the COVID variant, which also uses the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. Digital omicron, which is a fork of Olympus, is a decentralized yield farming project launched in early November. Its token OMIC can only be traded at decentralized crypto exchange Sushiswap. 

“I think that’s kind of the whole meme stock economy that we’re in,” Daniel Polotsky, founder and chief adviser of CoinFlip, told MarketWatch. “This project is still a very small project, despite its surge. There could be a lot of manipulation based on sentiment,” said Polotsky. 

Crypto executives to testify before Congress

On Dec. 8, CEOs of several major cryptocurrency companies will testify before the House Financial Services Committee starting at 10 a.m. ET, MarketWatch’s Chris Matthews reports.

The hearing is titled “Digital Assets and the Future of Finance” and will explore the “challenges and benefits” of financial innovations.

Witnesses will include Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of crypto exchange FTX, Brian Brooks, former acting Comptroller of the Currency and CEO of Bitfury, Chad Cascarilla, CEO of Paxos, Danelle Dixon, CEO of Stellar Development Foundation and Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase Global Inc.
COIN,
-3.32%.
 

Crypto companies, funds

In crypto-related company news, shares of Coinbase traded down 2.5% to $287 Thursday afternoon. It was down 8.1% for the past five trading days. Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy Inc. 
MSTR,
-3.13%
 dropped 3.1% to $683.9. It was down 2.4% over the past five days.

Mining company Riot Blockchain Inc. 
RIOT,
-7.39%
 shares fell 7.4% to $33, contributing to an 11% loss over the past five days. Shares of Marathon Digital Holdings Inc.
MARA,
-3.39%
 plunged 3.4% to $49, contributing to a 5.4% loss over the past five days. Another miner Ebang International Holdings Inc. 
EBON,

went up 1.4% to $1.5, with a 13% loss over the past five days.

Overstock.com Inc. 
OSTK,
-0.09%
 went down 0.7% to $84.1. The shares went down 9.4% over the past five days.

Square Inc. 
SQ,
-1.21%’s
shares fell 2.5% to $189.5, with a 12.1% loss for the past five days. Tesla Inc.’s
TSLA,
-0.95%
shares traded down 0.75% to $1,087, with a 2.6% loss over the past five days.

PayPal Holdings Inc. 
PYPL,
+4.37%
 rose 4.4% to $187, while it recorded a 0.8% loss over the past five days, while NVIDIA Corp.
NVDA,
+2.20%
 went up 2.4% to $321, with a 1.7% loss over the past five days.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. 
AMD,
+1.05%
went up 0.86% to $150.4 and logged a 4.9% loss over the past five trading days.

In the fund space, ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF 
BITO,
+0.58%
 went up 0.5% to $36.3 Thursday, while Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF 
BTF,
+0.22%
 rose 0.3% to $22.4. VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETF
XBTF,
+0.57%
inched up 0.6% to $56.6.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust
GBTC,
+1.16%
 went up 0.1% to $44.9, with a 2.7% loss over the past five days.

Must Reads

Sounds rich? Tesla’s website indicates that the Cyberquad for Kids already sold out. The electric quad bikes were restocked at some point on Thursday, and subsequently sold out again.

Features include a full steel frame, cushioned seat and adjustable suspension with rear disk braking and LED light bars, according to the product description. The Cyberquad for Kids is powered by a lithium-ion battery, and can reach speeds up to 10 miles per hour.

The Cyberquads should ship within two to four weeks, but Tesla noted that orders are not guaranteed to arrive before Christmas.

The OG Cybertruck proved similarly popular, even though some on social media mocked the angular design when Elon Musk first revealed it in 2019. The Tesla CEO tweeted at the time that the company racked up $20 million during the first three days of Cybertruck pre-orders.

Musk has sold about $9.85 billion worth of Tesla shares since Nov. 8 ,and has recently stated that he would be joining the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January to talk about Tesla’s supple chain issues.

Musk announced his intention while responding to a tweet on Twitter
TWTR,
-0.07%.
“This year has been such a supply chain nightmare [and] it’s not over! I will provide an updated product roadmap on next earnings call.”

Tesla is up 52.69% YTD, compared to the S&P 500
SPX,
+1.42%
which has risen 21.93% over that same period.

In 2017, they allegedly approached a third-party royalty management firm identified in court papers only by the initials A.R., falsely claiming to control the royalty rights to the songs. In some cases, Teran and Batista used forged notes from artists claiming they had the rights to manage the music, prosecutors said.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona, which is prosecuting the case, declined to elaborate beyond what was detailed in public court filings. 

Teran and Batista signed contracts with the management firm to monetize the music online, prosecutors said. The management firm then established MediaMuv’s credentials with YouTube, giving them copyright claims to the songs on the video platform.     

Representatives for YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Lawyers for Teran and Batista also didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Big money in music royalties

Over the next several years, prosecutors say Teran and Batista fraudulently collected more than $20 million in royalty payments from the arrangement, none of which they ever shared with the artists who had written the songs.

Prosecutors say that when the legitimate right’s holder for one song — identified in court papers only by the initials D.H. — filed a complaint to the third-party management company claiming copyright infringement, Teran boldly insisted the person had no legal grounds to stand on.

“Any issue that [D.H.] have with our content, he can email me directly, we will not issue any revenue share to him or anyone just because he says he had a right to, we have contracts and if he has any doubts we can keep discussing this in front of a federal judge, thanks,” court documents quoted Teran as writing in an email.

The men allegedly collected over $100,000 in royalty payments for the hit ballad “Me Llamas” by the Colombian pop group, Piso 21, according to court documents. A song from the 1980s by the long-running Mexican group, Los Caminantes, allegedly netted the pair $30,000 in payments. Representatives for the groups couldn’t be immediately reached.

Prosecutors allege the men collected more than $50,000 in royalty payments from music by 21 different groups. 

According to court documents, Teran used more than $500,000 of the money as a down payment to purchase a mansion in the Sonoran Foothills in the outskirts of Phoenix. The men also allegedly used $129,000 to purchase cars from Tesla, $93,000 to buy a BMW hybrid car from a dealer in Beverly Hills, and $62,000 to buy jewelry from a store in Manhattan.

Both men have been charged with 30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft. They could face decades behind bars and large fines if convicted.

 “Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets,” FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova said in a statement. “This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.”

In a statement, an Nvidia spokesperson said, “As we move into this next step in the FTC process, we will continue to work to demonstrate that this transaction will benefit the industry and promote competition.”

“Nvidia will invest in Arm’s R&D, accelerate its road maps, and expand its offerings in ways that boost competition, create more opportunities for all Arm licensees and expand the Arm ecosystem,” the statement continued. “Nvidia is committed to preserving Arm’s open licensing model and ensuring that its IP is available to all interested licensees, current and future.”

Nvidia’s proposal to acquire Arm from SoftBank Group Corp.
9984,
-5.10%
has met with several headwinds since it was announced back in late 2020, and the company said in its last earnings report in mid-November it was working with the FTC to address concerns raised by the deal.

Nvidia shares were up about 2% when the statement came out and were up 2.4% at $321.94 at last check.

Check back for more on this breaking story.

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It’s “a plan that all Americans hopefully can rally around, and it should get bipartisan support, in my humble opinion. It should unite us, not continue to separate us,” he added.

Biden responded to news that some GOP lawmakers have plotted to force a partial government shutdown in an effort to defund his administration’s vaccine mandate on the private sector.

“Some of my friends on the other team are arguing that if I don’t commit that there’ll never be any more mandates, they’re gonna let us default. In the neighborhood I come from in Claymont, they’d look at me and say, ‘Go figure,’” the president said, referring to his Delaware roots.

Biden later told reporters that he doesn’t expect government shutdown “unless somebody decides to be totally erratic.”

The administration’s winter COVID plan, which comes as the omicron variant of the coronavirus sparks concerns, includes an expansion for at-home testing in the U.S. and tighter COVID testing timelines for travelers entering the country.

There’s also a new campaign to encourage vaccinated people to get booster shots, as well as an effort to launch hundreds of family vaccination clinics across the country that would offer first shots for kids, boosters for adults and more.

“Now as we move into the winter and face the challenges of this new variant, this is a moment we can put the divisiveness behind us, I hope,” Biden said. “This is a moment we can do what we haven’t been able to do enough of through this whole pandemic — get the nation to come together, unite the nation in a common purpose to fight this virus, to protect one another, to protect our economic recovery.”

The strong open gave Grab a market capitalization of about $51.6 billion, but as of 3 p.m. Eastern time, the stock was down more than 20% to $8.60.

The Singapore-based company makes a “superapp” offering ride-hailing, delivery and financial services in more than 400 cities in Southeast Asia. Grab’s chief financial officer, Peter Oey, said in an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday that the company had its “roughest patch” in the third quarter ended Sept. 30 because of COVID-19-related shutdowns in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam. But he pointed to continued expected growth and recovery, even as the company watches what happens with the new coronavirus variant, omicron.

“Our mobility business has been rising as lockdowns have been relaxed,” he said. “Our payments business also continues to grow. We’re seeing all strong signs.”

Oey also touted Grab’s breadth and wide reach.

“Our superapp is so unique in Southeast Asia,” he said. “It’s ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, last-mile delivery and a whole range of financial services products all in one app.” He said the app “touches [consumers] in their everyday lives.”

Backers of Grab, which was founded in 2012, include Didi Global Inc.
DIDI,
+0.06%,
Toyota Motor Corp.
TM,
+2.50%
and SoftBank Group Corp.’s
9984,
-5.10%
Vision Fund.

Grab’s financial picture

Grab, like other ride-hailing and delivery app makers, has lost a lot of money since its founding in 2012: It had accumulated losses of $11.9 billion as of June 2021, according to its prospectus.

The company recently reported a third-quarter net loss of $988 million, an increase of $366 million year over year. Grab said its revenue fell 9% year over year to $157 million, citing COVID-19-related lockdowns in Vietnam between July and September that affected its ride-hailing, or mobility, business. It also said the number of its monthly users was down 8% year over year because those lockdowns resulted in suspensions of both its ride-hailing and food-delivery businesses in Vietnam.

However, the company touted a record $4 billion in gross merchandise value for the quarter, a 32% year-over-year increase, and said year-over-year gross billings rose 41% to $616 million, also a record high.

Risk factors

Besides Vietnam, Grab serves customers in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Oey described a “huge opportunity” with a total addressable market of $180 billion in the company’s core products of ride-hailing, delivery and payments.

The company competes with other platforms as well as restaurants and stores that have their own delivery services. It bought Uber Technologies Inc.’s
UBER,
+6.00%
business in Southeast Asia in 2018, but its noncompete agreement with Uber expires in March 2023, or one year after Uber disposes of its entire stake in Grab, whichever is later. Another possible rival is Didi, which could enter the market after its noncompete with Grab expires.

Like other gig companies, Grab considers its workers independent contractors. In its prospectus, the company mentions that governments in Southeast Asia have shown “growing interest” in the classification of Grab’s drivers and delivery workers because of related developments elsewhere in the world. In the U.S. and Europe, governments and courts have battled gig companies over the worker-classification issue.

For more: How Uber and Lyft are trying to pass new labor laws across the U.S.

Oey said there’s a “different backdrop in Southeast Asia” when it comes to the issue, pointing to the region’s many “informal workers.” He said that for nearly 50% of Grab’s 5 million registered drivers, “this is their first ability to earn something and make a decent living.”

“For a lot of them, it’s their first bank account,” he added. “A lot of them, it’s their first access to steady employment.”

As for coronavirus-related risk, vaccination rates in Asia vary and, like what happened with the full shutdown in Vietnam over the summer, could materially affect Grab’s businesses.

Companies are raising wages and have been more aggressive in hiring, the thinking goes. Delta cases have also leveled off and the expiration of extra unemployment benefits in September should push more people to look for work, experts say.

Maybe so. But it could take the U.S. a year and a half to return employment to precrisis trends even the economy continued to average 500,000 new jobs a month. The labor crunch isn’t going away soon.

Unemployment rate

The official unemployment rate is seen edging down to 4.5% from 4.6%. Believable? Not entirely.

The jobless rate still isn’t capturing all the people who are really unemployed. Nor does the official figure include the millions of people who dropped out of the labor force and are not counted in the unemployment rate.

Economists suspect the true unemployment rate is a few points higher. But not because jobs are scarce. Job openings are near a record high and Americans say the labor market is as good as ever.

Labor force growing?

The lasting damage from the pandemic is most evident in the depressed percentage of able-bodied civilians 16 or older in the labor force. The so-called participation rate fell to a 47-year low of 60.2% in 2020 and has barely budged in the past year.

Before the pandemic the rate stood at 63.4%.

Economists predict more people entered the labor force in November, but the worst labor shortage in decades will persist — and hold back the economic recovery — until more many people resume working or looking for work.

Read: Jobless claims jump 28,000 to 222,000, but big ups and downs around Thanksgiving raise questions

Wages and inflation

Workers are benefiting from the labor shortage, all right. Wages are rising sharply. Average hourly pay has jumped 4.9% over the past 12 months and a similar reading in expected in November.

The downside? Rising wages are feeding into the biggest surge in U.S. inflation in 31 years. So the cost of living is increasing faster than the amount of money Americans earn.