Hello and welcome back to Equity, the Tech Runch Podcast, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines.

It is Monday, March 6, 2023, and this is Alex, your intrepid nerd bestie.

In case you didn't know this is our Monday show where we take a look back at the weekend.

A look forward at the week and generally try to get our bearings for the coming days.

And no, this podcast is not an attempt by me to figure out

some way to turn prep into content. We even find time on the Monday show to chat

through a couple of startup rounds from the last couple of days so let's have some fun

let's get it.

Opening as we do with markets let's take a look at stocks around the world the stock market has been uneven today. Shares ripped higher in Japan and South

Korea but fell in China according to some major indices. Over in Europe shares

were I would say very mixed but with perhaps a little bit more red ink than green and

here in the US it appears that stocks are going to start about as flat as can be

all told not that much going on now before we head into the rest of the news a brief note that China's latest government meeting

did lead to lower than anticipated growth targets on the GDP level and a very visible favoring of hardware tech companies think AI and

chips and so forth over their internet-based peers. Something to chew on if you care

about Chinese startups. Moving from stocks to the more wild world of crypto what's going on

well in aggregate the so-called crypto market cap is nearly precisely at the one

trillion dollar mark this morning proving largely unable once again to break out of that range.

Now driving that market cap figure is the value of major crypto tokens like

Bitcoin and Ether that endured a synchronized decline last week that has since persisted.

The two tokens are down around 4.5% in the last week, though they haven't moved much since.

Elsewhere in crypto, well, in NFT land a recent boom in trading volume has lost some steam.

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