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[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Biden to sanction Russia, big retail sales number expected, and a raft of corporate news. New measures The Biden administration is poised to [impose a raft of new sanctions on Russia]( in retaliation for alleged misconduct including the SolarWinds hack and efforts to disrupt the U.S. election. The ruble and Russian bonds sank as the measures [include long-feared restrictions]( on U.S. financial institutions participating in the primary market for new debt issued by the country. The White House move comes [as tensions between the countries rise]( with Russia [building up troops on the border with Ukraine](. Claims Fed Chair Jerome Powell again [sounded optimistic about U.S. growth prospects]( yesterday when speaking at the Economic Club of Washington. Retail sales data this morning -- expected to [show a 5.8% jump in March]( -- and a dip in weekly jobless claims to 700,000 are likely to reinforce his thesis about a rapid recovery. Both sets of data are published at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. Paid Post What the American Jobs Plan Could Mean for Infrastructure Investment With the recent unveiling of the $2T+ American Jobs Plan, [we explore]( the areas of infrastructure that could potentially benefit, how the plan might be funded, and what legislation may look like after passing through congress. [Global X ETFs]( Corporate Bank of America Corp. was out early this morning with an earnings beat on trading revenue -- something that seems to be a [trend among Wall Street banks in the last quarter](. Citigroup Inc. and BlackRock Inc. are also due to report before the bell. Elsewhere in corporate news, Coinbase's [direct listing]( seems set to have a [second-day boost]( after three funds at Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management [bought shares](. Markets rise Strong earnings and a rally in base metals are helping drive global equities to fresh records. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.5% while Japan's Topix index closed 0.3% higher. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index had gained 0.3% by 5:50 a.m. with miners helping push the gauge to record levels. S&P 500 futures pointed to [plenty of green at the open](, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.613%, oil was [close to $63 a barrel]( and gold gained. Coming up... Turkey's central bank announces its [latest monetary policy decision]( at 7:00 a.m., the first under its new governor. As well as retail sales and claims, we get April Empire Manufacturing and the Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook at 8:30 a.m. Industrial and manufacturing production for March are at 9:15 a.m. and February business inventories and the April NAHB Housing Market Index are at 10:00 a.m. TIC flow data for February is at 4:00 p.m. In Washington there is a House panel hearing on the Libor transition. As well as the banks, UnitedHealth Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., PepsiCo Inc. and Alcoa Corp. report results. What we've been reading Here's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours. - Odd Lots: Zach Carter on the [real story of Weimar hyperinflation](. - [China's very bad bank](: inside the Huarong debt debacle. - What happens when [an oil giant walks away](. - Inside the secret battery lab [with a $20 billion breakthrough](. - A 23-year-old coder [kept QAnon online]( when no one else would. - [Who gets how much](: Big questions about reparations for slavery. - Move over SETI, study suggests it is [time to try SETA](. And finally, here’s what Joe's interested in this morning Bitcoiners are in a triumphant mood these days. The price is near all-time highs. Coinbase just went public. Institutional interest is growing. All the naysayers who mocked it over the last decade are humiliated and Having Fun Staying Poor. However in their drive towards victory, there is one recurring Bitcoin talking point that must be debunked. The claim that Bitcoin is now the 5th biggest currency in the world, even larger than the British pound. Here is a [chart]( published by [Crypto Voices]( from February, when it was still below $50K per coin and its total market cap was just under $900 billion, and it shows it knocking on the door of the British pound based on the total "monetary base" of the pound and other fiat currencies. Since the chart was published of course, Bitcoin has grown a lot more and would now be, theoretically, in 5th place. Now right away you should immediately see the problem. This idea of ranking currencies based on the size of their so-called monetary base means the yen and the euro are both larger than the U.S. dollar. I'm really not sure what to tell you, but I'll just say this. If you ever get to a point in life where you're ranking the size of currencies, and somehow you stumble on a measure which purports to show that the yen and the euro are larger than the dollar, you need to just stop everything and re-evaluate the decisions that got you to this point. Because everybody knows that's nonsense, and you should start looking for another measure. Seriously, that fact alone should tell you you've stumbled on a very wrong way to measure currencies. [And yet within the Bitcoin community]( rankings like this one proliferate. We could stop right there, but it's worth powering forward for a second to just explain the levels of wrongness at play here. First, what are we even talking about when we are talking about the monetary base like this? As the creator of the above chart Matthew Mežinskis explained on the [On The Brink Podcast]( with [Nic Carter](, it's a combination of coin and cash out there, plus the reserves the banks hold at monetary authorities. The problem is that reserves is just not that useful as a measure of anything. All it simply reflects these days is how much QE the central bank has done. QE is a swap of one type of government liability (a government bond like a Treasury or a Gilt) for another type of government liability (reserves). It's not a measure of currency size. It simply reflects how the government has chosen to structure its own liabilities. Bitcoiners may admit that it's not a perfect measure, but then they say it's conceptually useful, because just as fiat currency has various Ms (M1, M2, M3 etc) reflecting broadening forms of the money, so too does Bitcoin, which has a base layer (the blockchain) but also has Layer 2 payments whereby transactions can be conducted off chain and then settled ultimately on the chain itself. You can actually think of the newly public Coinbase as offering centralized Layer 2 payments, because they enable instant Bitcoin transfers between Coinbase users. Those transactions aren't actually registered on the blockchain itself. They're just reflected in Coinbase's own internal ledger. There are also other solutions such as the decentralized [Lightning Network]( that allow multiple parties to enter into transactions, which only later get properly settled on the blockchain itself. But while it's seductive to compare the levels of Bitcoin and fiat this way, the analogy doesn't take you very far. The conceptual flaw is that Bitcoin's second layer solutions need the dollar value of the base layer to grow in order to scale. You can't have billions of layer 2 Bitcoin transactions until the base layer is worth several billions. With fiat, no such constraint exists. Everyday dollar payments scale just as well today as they did before the Global Financial Crisis, when the amount of Fed reserves were much smaller, because QE wasn't a thing yet. Dollar transactions don't need a large base money at all, whereas Bitcoin transactions absolutely do. So the chart fails on its face. (Obviously the euro and yen aren't bigger than the dollar). It fails conceptually since base money isn't a measure of a currency's size. And it fails logically. Base money measures aren't analogous structurally to Bitcoin's base layer, because for Bitcoin, growth in the base is needed in order to scale payments, and this isn't the case for fiat. You know there are always long-running Twitter arguments about whether Bitcoin is technically a currency or not. And TBH I don't find the discussion to be that important. But if Bitcoiners are going to insist on actually comparing the currency to the big fiats, then they should use proper measures. What is the Bitcoin share of international payments? What is the Bitcoin share of central bank reserves? How much Bitcoin-denominated debt is there? These are the logical type of ways to rank and compare money. By these rankings, Bitcoin is still incredibly tiny. Now it's true, more and more people use Bitcoin as an investment vehicle and that's getting pretty big. At $1.2 trillion, it's smaller than Alphabet, but larger than Facebook. It's also around the value of all NYC real estate, [which was pegged last year around $1.4 trillion](. Pretty impressive as an investment or savings vehicle no doubt! But so far, as a currency it just doesn't measure up yet to the big ones. If Bitcoin ever gathers real steam as a way that people pay for things, we can revisit the currency ranking side seriously. Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg. Like Bloomberg's Five Things? [Subscribe for unlimited access]( to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close.  Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](.  You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Five Things newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022