Bitcoin's whipsawing price action cleared out both longs and shorts

I hope you had a good weekend, folks. Bitcoin's whipsawing price action on Sunday and Monday cleared out both longs and shorts. But is this the final shakeout before all-time highs

People are still discussing the finality of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on President Biden’s attempt to cancel federal student loan programs.

The court ruled 6-3 to invalidate Biden’s plan, tying it to an administrative law doctrine known as the “major questions” rule. That doctrine says Congress must clearly authorize any major federal programs or regulations.

The justices said the Education Department didn’t have clear authorization from Congress to carry out such a sweeping student loan cancellation program.

“We do not express any view on the merits of the programs or on the broad question of whether the administration acted unlawfully in selecting the programs to cancel,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

“But the programs at issue here are not minor adjustments to existing regulations. They are designed to provide substantial macroeconomic relief.”

The Biden administration argued that the 1990 legislation that created the student loan program gave the Education Secretary the authority to “compromise, modify, or restructure” student loan obligations in response to a national emergency.

After the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, then-President Trump declared a national emergency. Biden later used that declaration to authorize broad student loan cancellation.

But the justices said that interpretation of the 1990 legislation was not “a reasonable reading.” They said the statute’s grant of authority to the president was “not minor, technical, or trivial.”

“It is not plausible that Congress, in a brief codicil to a sprawling statute, intended to grant the president the sweeping authority over student loans that the administration claims,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Justice Elena Kavanaugh, in a dissenting opinion, said the majority opinion had “no basis in the statute, the administrative state, or Article III.”

“Congress plainly granted the Secretary the authority to carry out the plan, and the court had no authority to intervene,” Kavanaugh said.

“The majority overturns a program that the president devised and the administration implemented in response to a devastating pandemic.”

The justices also ruled 8-1 on a separate case that involved a group of students who sued the administration over its plan to discharge some student loans in accordance with a 2007 law.

In that case, the justices upheld the administration’s plan. They said the students had no standing to sue because the administration never completed its plan to carry out discharges under the 2007 law.

The administration had begun developing a plan to carry out discharges under the 1990 legislation, but that plan was later canceled.