Coinbase announced on Tuesday it would be laying off about 25% of its staff, roughly 950 people. The cuts came amid a prolonged bear market for crypto and the collapse of major companies like FTX, with CEO Brian Armstrong writing in a blog post that there could be further contagion following the tumultuous past few months.

Coinbase has long positioned itself as a rule-abiding player in the crowded landscape of renegade crypto companies, buttressed by quarterly reports as one of the few publicly traded centralized exchanges.  

Last week, the New York Department of Financial Services announced it had reached a $100 million settlement with Coinbase due to failures in the exchanges compliance program, which some onlookers took to be a sign that it was committed to long-term regulation.

Despite Coinbases efforts, Crypto Winter has hit the company hardshares have decreased by almost 90% since November 2021, and the exchange posted weak third-quarter earnings in November, including a decrease in net revenue of almost 28%.

One of its only bright spots is the companys holdings of USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, which Coinbase owns through a consortium with Circle. Due to rising interest rates, Coinbase has been able to collect revenue on those holdings, with interest income rising to $101.8 million in the third quarter of 2022, up from just $32.5 million the previous quarter.

Layoffs have followed the economic turmoil. In May, as the collapse of TerraUSD rocked the crypto landscape, Coinbase announced it would slow hiring after announcing it would triple headcount as recently as February. In June, the company laid off around 1,100 employees, then equivalent to roughly 18% of its workforce, with Armstrong conceding that the exchange had grown too quickly.  

Armstrong acknowledged current economic headwinds in Tuesdays blog post, writing that tech companies have become too focused on growing headcount as a metric for success.

Especially in this economic environment, its important to shift our focus to operational efficiency, he said.  

Layoffs have rippled throughout the industry. In December, CoinDesk reported that more than 26,000 jobs were lost in 2022, and the trend has continued into 2023. On Jan. 5, Reuters reported that the crypto firm Genesis cut 30% of its workforce and the crypto-focused bank Silvergate had laid off 40% of its staff.

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Fast-forward to today, and the Feds ongoing inflation-fight has once again spurred a mortgage rate shock. This spike in mortgage rates, which are up from 3.22% to 6.48% over the past 12 months, has pushed the U.S. housing market into a full-blown housing correction.

On one hand, 6% mortgage rates are hardly historically abnormal. On the other hand, that 3.22 percentage point jump in mortgage rates over the past year has delivered an affordability shock thats similar to the one dealt in 1981 when mortgage rates climbed 4.9 percentage points to 18%.

See, its less about the numerical mortgage rate and more about the total monthly mortgage payment as a percentage of new borrowers incomes. And when accounting for everything (i.e. home prices, incomes, and mortgage rates) the 2022 affordability squeeze is nearly on par with the 1981 affordability squeeze.

Affordability has evaporated, and with it, housing demand, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys Analytics, tells Fortune.

This isnt happening by mistake: Back in June 2022, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the housing market needed to go through a reset in order to cool housing inflation and put the housing market and economy at large into better balance. Thats why the Fed, which halted its buying of mortgage-backed securities and jacked up the Federal Funds rate, put immense upward pressure on mortgage rates in 2022. At the end of the day, if housing affordability gets too pressurizedsomething were seeing right nowinvestors and first-time homebuyers alike will stop bidding up prices (i.e. slowing housing inflation) and homebuilders will then pullback (i.e. giving supply chains breathing room).

For the longer term what we need is supply and demand to get better aligned so that housing prices go up at a reasonable level and at a reasonable pace and that people can afford houses again. We probably in the housing market have to go through a [housing] correction to get back to that place, Powell told reporters in September. This difficult [housing] correction should put the housing market back into better balance.

As long as housing affordability remains pressurized like this, Zandi believes home sales will remain weak and national home prices will continue to fall. Heading forward, Zandi says there are three levers that can depressurize housing affordability: Rising incomes, falling home prices, and falling mortgage rates.

Of those three levers, agents and builders alike are closely watching to see if mortgage rates will fall. First, it's the lever that can move up and down with the most ease. Second, financial marketswhich increasingly believe the Fed is on a path to taming inflationhave in recent weeks put some downward pressure on mortgage rates. The average 30-year fixedmortgage rate reading on Thursday (6.48%) is well below the cycle high in November (7.08%). If financial conditions continue to loosen, mortgage rates would continue to fall.

To get a better gauge of what buyers and sellers might see in 2023, Fortune tracked down mortgage rate forecasts from seven leading research firms (Fortune did a similar roundup last week for 2023 home price forecasts). Keep in mind that during an inflationary run it's incredibly challenging to predict future fluctuations in mortgage rates.

Mortgage Bankers Association: The D.C.-based trade group projects that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate will average 5.2% in 2023. Beyond this year, it expects the average mortgage rate to hover around 4.4% in 2024 and 2025.

Fannie Mae: Economists at Fannie Mae, which was chartered by U.S. Congress in 1938 to provide affordable mortgage financing, project that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate will average 6.3% in 2023 and 5.6% in 2024.

Freddie Mac: Economist at Freddie Mac, which like Fannie Mae was also chartered to provide affordable mortgage financing, forecasts that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate will average 6.4% in 2023.

Goldman Sachs: The investment bank projects that the fixed 30-year mortgage rate is poised to average 6.2% in 2023. (Here's Goldman Sach's home price outlook).

Moody's Analytics: The financial intelligence arm of Moody's projects that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate will average 6.5% through the 2023 spring housing market. (You can find Moody's Analytics regional and national home price outlook here)

Morgan Stanley: The Agency MBS strategists at Morgan Stanley believe that mortgage rates will fall to 6% by the end of 2023. (Here's the investment bank's home price outlook).

Realtor.com: Economists at the home listing site believe the 30-year fixed mortgage rate will average 7.4% in 2023.

Want to stay updated on the housing correction? Follow me on Twitter at @NewsLambert.

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E-commerce giant Shopify welcomed its staff back from their Christmas holiday last week by announcing a calendar purge to give employees more time to work on other tasks.

The changes, which are effective immediately, include removing all recurring meetings with more than two people in perpetuity, shoehorning meetings of more than 50 people into a six-hour window on Thursdays, and limiting big meetings to once a week. Meanwhile, Wednesdays will become a no-meeting day and employees have been urged to be really critical when deciding whether to add a meeting back to schedules at all.

In an email, Kaz Nejatian, Shopifys vice president of product and chief operating officer, told employees that the shift away from recurring meetings also meant moving away from unproductive schedules and unlocking more time for employees to focus on their work. 

We can either go slow and deliberate, or fast and chaotic. We are going fast and chaotic, he wrote. While we know this will feel chaotic, thats the point. Intentional chaos is more than okay, and its part of working and thriving at Shopify.

In total, the calendar cull will free up more than 76,500 hours of meetings, a company spokesperson told Fortune.

Are meetings a waste of time?

Yes and no. 

Ayelet Fishbach, professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says that cracking down on large meetings decreases the likelihood of group decision-making issues like social loafing and conformity pressure. 

Social loafing happens when people reduce their effort, assuming someone else will pick up the slack. Meanwhile, conformity pressure happens when people converge early on an idea that is presented in the meeting before theyve had a chance to think independently about the issues.

The risk is you may end up with 10 people thinking like one person, she says. 

Plus, while the social interaction that comes with meetings is crucial to employee wellbeing and engagement, big meetings where employees are talked at arent. 

Meetings that require passive participation dont offer social interactions and dont increase engagement. They might even decrease engagement if people feel their day is wasted on meetings, Fishbach adds.

But Amrit Sandhar, founder of The Engagement Coach, which works with brands such as Bupa and Dunelm to increase employee engagement, describes the changes as more like something from Elon Musks playbook on improving efficiency, than preparing the organization for change.

As much as employees may complain about meetings wasting their time, for remote workers it might be the only chance to interact with other colleagues across the organization and feel a part of the company culture. 

Remove the interactions, and you remove any sense of belonging with the organization, leaving people to pursue jobs offering greater connection elsewhere, Sandhar cautions. 

Plus, although the leaders at Shopify probably imagined workers would breathe a sigh of relief at their meeting-free calendar, in reality, swift changes like this could actually cause undue uncertainty and stress among workers.

Change creates uncertainty even desired change, he says, adding that change for the sake of change only causes disruption, adding to an already pressured workload.

How to strike a balance between meeting overload and lonely remote workers

Meetings dont need to be banished completely, its just the ineffective, time-wasting ones that do, says Ben Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Employment Hero.

But cancel all communication and businesses risk having unaccountable workers running around like headless chickens.

Fishbach echoes that fewer meetings can increase their wellbeing. But thats assuming remote workers arent missing out on critical information such as new directions for the team or promotion opportunities.

For remote workers to be productive and engaged, businesses need to ensure that theyre replacing meetings with other effective ways of sharing information and enabling colleagues to connect instead of cutting out communication and collaboration altogether.  

Thompson suggests that leaders consider which digital tools work best for different forms of communication. For example, Slack might be a better way of making sure individual team members are on top of their work, rather than a big team meeting where everyone talks through their to-do list. 

Chosing the right remote meeting platform will come down to understanding what it is your team needs to collaborate and communicate effectively, he adds.

Alternatively, employers could empower workers to push back on meetings they feel are productivity-draining. A simple criterion for declining meetings could be allowing workers to ask themselves if there is anything they can contribute to the meeting and if the outcome will be any different if they arent there. Then for employee engagement and to build company culture among remote workers, leaders could allocate optional time aside for casual conversation.

Organizations that focus on reframing meetings as an avenue to demonstrate the organizations culture, allowing time to socialize as well as interacting with colleagues to achieve great results, will have more engaged and committed remote employees than those that choose to reduce or remove them altogether, Sandhar adds.

Overall, its the quality of the meetings that matter not the quantity. 

Striking that balance between overloading workers calendars and leaving them isolated is important. Otherwise, Sandhar and Fishbach warn that firms risk looking like they dont value socialization, which is needed to stimulate creativity and innovation, as well as the sanity of remote workers.

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The Wests price cap on Russian crude oil could have a catastrophic effect on Vladimir Putins finances and force the pariah state into imposing austerity measures this year.

The price of the Urals benchmark grade of crude oil exported from Russia has been falling steadily since the cap went into effect on Dec. 5. At that level, production can continue, but at a level much closer to extraction costs. thereby greatly diminishing Russian profits.

The price on Urals crude is down sharply versus Brent since the start of the G7 cap, wrote Robin Brooks, chief economist of the international finance industry lobby group IIF. Thats good, as Putin gets less cash to fight his war.

Last year, the average price for Russias Urals benchmark grade was $76.09 per barrel, the countrys finance ministry said last week. 

The price plummeted in December, however. In the first month of the cap, it fell to an average of just $50.47 per barrel, down nearly a third from the comparable period a year earlier. 

Worse for Moscow, Urals crude recently traded at $38 below the $40 threshold that many believe to be Russias production cost.

The Ministry of Finance confirmed that everything with regard to Urals prices is not just bad, but very bad, Cetrocredit Bank economist Yevgeny Suvorov told the Moscow Times. $40 per barrel can be a real catastrophe for the budget and economy If it becomes clear that $45-50 is a new normal, the finance ministry will have to switch to an austerity regime this year. 

European dilemmas

One of the dilemmas Europe has faced is how to end its dependency on Russian imports that fund Putins war effort at a time when the invasion itself has driven up global energy prices and filled the Kremlins coffers. 

An oil embargo effectively imposed by the EU did not help, since it is believed Europe imported crude from ships flown under neutral third country flagsor even EU ones like Greecethat may have secretly blended their cargo with millions of barrels of Russian oil sold at a war premium.

With Europe starving its economy of precious energy while Russia lined its pockets thanks to higher global prices, many critics argued the Wests economic sanctions had backfired.

Enter the price cap reached by the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K.collectively, the G7 group of nationsas well as Australia.  

It was designed to eliminate this sanctions backfire by enabling Russia to legally export oil via tankers either operated or financed by western alliance companiesso long as these only pay a maximum of $60 for each barrel. Importantly, the dominant shipping insurers are based in the G7 and Europe, making it extremely difficult for third countries to circumvent this measure.

A separate price cap that applies to all refined petroleum products goes into effect on Feb. 5, some three weeks before the anniversary of Putins invasion. This cap is expected to impose further stress on the Russian treasury. 

Fiscal policy will struggle in 2023, warned Natalia Orlova, chief economist at Russias Alfa Bank, in the Moscow Times. 

However, not all experts concur that the price cap is the primary driver behind the sudden sharp price drop in Urals. 

Janis Kluge from the German Institute for International and Security affairs argued the the EUs oil embargo is making it incrementally harder for Russia to find enough replacement demand for its shipments. 

Diverting the first million barrels per day of oil away from the EU was doable, he wrote, but diverting the second million barrels per day is much harder. 

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The CEO of an up-and-coming craft brewery has admitted a silly social media blunder cost him more than two and a half years payor almost $600,000.

In a LinkedIn post on Friday, BrewDog boss James Watt admitted to some costly mistakes that sparked a string of events he described as pretty grim.

Multinational brewery and pub chain BrewDogwhich is headquartered in Scotland but also has several bars in the U.S. and plans to expand into India, Ireland and Italyscaled rapidly thanks to crowdfunding.

Britains Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ruled in 2021 that a BrewDog promotion offering customers the chance to win solid gold beer cans that had been hidden in regular cases was misleading. As well as being told they could keep the cans, winners had been promised 15,000 ($18,210) worth of BrewDog shares.

Some winners complained to the regulator, however, after discovering that the cans were actually gold-plated.

Referring to the promotion as a 500,000 mistake, Watt detailed in his post last week how the failed promotion had been my mistake and mine alone.

Inspired by everything Willie Wonka I decided that we should hide 50 gold cans in cases of beer, he explained. We found an amazing goldsmith to make the cans for us and when they arrived at the brewery, we were blown away by how beautiful they were.

In his enthusiasm for the promotion, Watt said, he misunderstood how they had been made and sent a series of tweets that told his followers there was a possibility they would find solid gold cans if they bought a specific case of beer.

It was a silly mistake and it only appeared in around three of a total of 50 posts about the promotion but as it turns out, those three tweets were enough to do a lot of damage, he added. Those were three very expensive mistaken tweets that I sent out in my enthusiasm for our new campaign.

Conceding that BrewDog deserved the flak it received online and in the media over the gold cans campaign, Watt said he decided to do something radical to fix his error.

I got in touch with all 50 winners and let them know that if they were unhappy with their prize I would personally offer them the full cash amount as an alternative, he said. Furthermore, I promised to fund this myself so the business did not have to suffer financially from my mistake. All in all, it ended up costing me around 470,000 ($570,570)well over 2 and a half years salary.

Brewdogs latest problem

Watts costly error with the gold cans promotion is the latest in a string of public mistakes Brewdog has come under fire for in recent years, with accusations of bullying, intimidation and inappropriate behavior swirling around the firm.

In 2021, present and former BrewDog staffers wrote an open letter detailing a culture of fear within the company, with signatories demanding an apology for harassing, assaulting, belittling, insulting, and gaslighting.

The company has reportedly spent millions of dollars trying to fix its culture problems, with boss Watt publicly apologizing for former employees negative experiences at the firm.

Former staffers who spoke out in a 2022 BBC investigation have since told the broadcaster that they have felt intimidated or threatened since the program aired, with several saying they had been visited by private investigators.

Representatives for BrewDog did not respond to Fortunes request for comment on those allegations.

In the run-up to the soccer World Cup last year, BrewDog stylized itself as the anti-sponsor of the event, criticizing host country Qatar over its human rights recordonly to face a slew of backlash for its own history of questionable employment practices.

Last year, Watt spoke publicly about his personal struggles heading up the brewery, admitting: at times in the journey I have been too intense, I have been too demanding I did push people too far.

BrewDog reportedly said last year that it had been valued at more than 1.8 billion ($2 billion)but an earlier dispute over the companys outrageous valuation was said to have caused an end to a potential partial sale to Heineken in 2018.

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Coinbase Global Inc. is firing about 950 employees, or about 20% of its workforce, as the worsening crypto slump spurs another round of layoffs at the biggest US digital-asset exchange. 

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong announced the job reductions in a blog post Tuesday, saying the steps were needed to weather the industry downturn.

In June, Coinbase announced it would lay off 18% of its workforce, the equivalent of roughly 1,200 employees. It eliminated another 60 positions in November. It will now shut down several projects.

Coinbase expects to book $149 million to $163 million of restructuring charges, according to a statement on Tuesday. The overhaul will be substantially complete by the end of the second quarter, it said. As a result, adjusted EBITDA for the full year ended Dec. 31 is expected to be around negative $500 million.

Cryptos bear market is entering its second year, and the industry has suffered a series of meltdowns that hurt its outlook, most lately the bankruptcy of rival exchange FTX. With revenues falling and profits evaporating, companies across the sector have resorted to steep cost cuts in past months. 

Coinbases shares tumbled 86% last year, dropping more than the market bellwether Bitcoin, which slumped 64%. The stock fell about 2.3% before the start of regular trading in the US on Tuesday. 

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Applications have recently opened for any foodies dream job.

Whoever bags the job at the JPMorgan-owned The Infatuation will receive an annual budget of $30,000 to spend in New York Citys 27,000+ restaurants (including 73 Michelin star restaurants). 

The successful applicant will take on the role of editor at The Infatuation, a restaurant review platform recently acquired by the banking giant, with a salary ranging from $85,000 to $130,000. 

According to the job listing, it is an editing job and also very much an eating job. The eating budget amounts to around $2,500 a monththat is, almost $600 per week, or over $80 per day. 

Of course theres more to it than simply working your way through the Big Apples top eateries; the successful applicant will be required to edit reviews and newsletters as well as research and fact check the historical and cultural context of various cuisines, dishes and neighborhoods. 

Who can apply?

Although anyone can apply, the listing does stress that ideal candidates must know New York City, in its entirety, and its restaurants inside and out, from the newcomers to the longtime classics (and everything in between). 

The best person for the job should also be the kind of person who plans trips around what youre going to eat, and youre the friend in the group who picks the restaurant, but be wise to cliche vocabulary of food-writing such as foodie or nestled or toothsome. 

As for the mouth-watering sum of money youll get to use on dining alone, the listing says: If that sounds amazing rather than intimidating to you, we should talk! 

JPMorgan Chase acquired The Infatuation in 2021 as part of its increasing investment into dining. 

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