Bitcoin’s Comeback, Toxic Return-to-Office: Saturday US Briefing

Bitcoin began 15 years ago as an alternative to the centralized financial system, so it’s a bit ironic that the key forces behind its resurgence to near-record territory are the SEC and Wall Street. With Bitcoin exchange-traded funds now legit, resistance among big players is crumbling and stoking a crypto asset famously pooh-poohed by JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon. Stocks are powering ahead, too, extending a streak of S&P 500 records. But for better or worse, traditional finance firms are now also married to crypto — though we still don’t know who invented Bitcoin.

It’s relatively easy in crypto world to be agnostic about where you work. Not so in more conventional parts of the US economy, where return-to-office policies are exposing yet another front in America’s political culture wars. While about two thirds of Democrats in a poll for Bloomberg said it's unfair for companies to require in-person work for jobs that can be remote, only about half of Republicans agreed. So-called knowledge workers are an easy target for voters whose jobs may never have been remote.