Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, November 18th, and this is your FT News briefing.

The buzz over cryptocurrency is starting to fizzle and HSBC is struggling to fill a key role.

Plus a massive infrastructure project in Saudi Arabia is nearing the end of the line.

They found they were going to need like

60% of the world's recycled steel every year. They were going to need more cement than France

produced every year. It became a very, very difficult project to do. I'm Mark Filipino,

and here's the news you need to start your day.

The cryptocurrency industry has been dreaming of a golden era during U.S. President Donald Trump's second term,

but some of that luster might be coming off.

That's because Bitcoin and other digital currencies have lost all of the gains they've made since Trump's inauguration in January.

Here to explain what's going on is George Steer. He's the FTs U.S. markets correspondent. Hi, George. Hello. So what is going on? What's soured sentiment on these

digital coins? So the global cryptocurrency market hit a fresh high on October the 6th when the total value peaked

at around $4.2, $4.3 trillion. And then it slipped a little over the next few days, but the

sell-off really intensified on October the 10th when Trump came out and threatened massive tariffs

on China.

And that was at a point in time when the market had kind of assumed that the worst of the tariff back and forth had passed.

So there was a big sell-off.

And that sell-off kind of spilled over into the crypto ecosystem

and sparked this huge sell-off for a lot of the kind of mid-tier and lower-quality coins, some of which shed like half of

their value within 24 hours. And then you add on the fact that the Federal Reserve at the end

of October said that a December rate cut might not be a foregone conclusion. And you have like

all of the ingredients for kind of profit taking among some of the more speculative assets

...