No waiteen’ if you’re eighteen. Starting May 1st, people above 18 years can get vaccinated. And Amul had its own style of spreading its shot of butter!
…or rather every day is a dog’s day? What happened on 4/20?!
Dogecoin. The crypto currency originated from a joke. It was created by two engineers – Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus. It was intended to be a satirical alternative to Bitcoin. in 2013 inspired by a popular meme of the Japanese Shiba Inu Dog. But unlike Bitcoin, Dogecoin does not have any upper limit. This means there are already more than 100 billion Dogecoins currently in existence. But Bitcoin has just 21M coins.
Bitcoin can go like…. “call your Doges off!”
The Rise and The Rally. The rally was splurged by a series of tweets from Elon Musk earlier this year. That was not it! The hype sparked after tweets from Snoop Dogg, Gene Simmons, and Guy Fieri. The increase in demand for crypto among investors led to Bitcoin’s surge to more than $60K & the IPO listing of crypto-exchange platform Coinbase likely also supported the continued rally in dogecoin to a massive 8,000 percent.
4/20-2021 aka Doge Day. After an ad by Slim Jim (yes, the bold & spicy meat sticks & jerky snack), the social media became hysterical…it drove up the price of Dogecoin by 5X. It rallied 4005 in the last week and reached a market cap of $50B which is more than Ford or Marriott or Kraft Heinz or DoorDash. Newcomers piled into Dogecoin to such a degree last week that investors on Robinhood Markets Inc.’s trading app had trouble executing trades.
The Dogecoin joke was taken seriously.
Speculation 1. Dogecoin currently has a 16.7 percent implied probability to be worth more than $1 at the end of 2021, according to betting aggregators US-Bookies.com, a significant improvement from earlier this month, when it had just a 2.9 percent chance to do so.
Speculation 2. “Investors should be extremely cautious about getting caught up in this herd mentality because dogecoin is very much a speculative bet whose valuation has no reliable basis,” said Susanna Street, senior investment and markets analyst at stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown.
Food for Thought. The rise of retail investing, demand for cryptocurrency, stay-at-home life, etc might have equally contributed to Doge’s rally. But are the people investing in a cultural fad? Some are just using Dogecoin as a mode to tip online to content creators and to support causes that appeal to them. Just because a lot of people are buying Dogecoin might not mean investors can get more returns on investment….because on 4/21-2021, it fell by 15.4 percent, from $0.41 to $0.33.
…more than anything, the Dogecoin hype reminds of the GameStop episode establishing the influence of social media platforms like Twitter & Reddit as an epicenter of financial mania.
The United Kingdom. The strange world of VAT where there is no tax on biscuits or cakes but when a biscuit is covered in chocolate it becomes subject to the standard rate of 17.5%.
Jaffa Cakes. It’s a delicious structure consisting of a small sponge with a chocolate cap covering a veneer of orange jelly. It is arguably Britain’s greatest invention after the steam engine and the light bulb. -BBC
Tax Case, 1991. This classification was challenged by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in 1991. The manufacturer, McVities, had always categorized them as cakes, and to boost their revenue the tax authorities wanted them recategorized as biscuits.
Is it a cake or biscuit? Jaffa Cakes are more biscuit than cake in several ways. They are packaged like biscuits, and they are marketed like biscuits: they are usually found in the biscuit aisle in shops. But maybe it is a cake… Coz, they have also have fundamental cake-esque qualities. They have the ingredients of a traditional sponge cake: eggs, flour, and sugar.
The ruling. When Jaffa Cakes go stale they become hard, unlike biscuits, which become soft. This was the deciding point for the court and the decision was in favor of McVities.
Hence, Jaffa Cakes are zero-rated in the U.K.
