Market Watch review. 28.12.2020

In today's release, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Britain and the European Union agree on a trade deal.
• Donald Trump signed the 2021 budget.
• A sharp rise in cryptocurrency capitalization.

Britain and the European Union have agreed on the parameters of a Brexit trade deal, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote on Twitter.

The agreement consists of two thousand pages and must now be ratified by the Parliament.

In turn, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen said at a press conference that the EU and Britain remain allies and will continue to cooperate.

She also noted that Brexit without the agreement would have hit the UK harder than the EU, and the agreed document between London and Brussels was the most comprehensive.

Negotiations on the terms of the post-Brexit trade agreement have been stalled for months. London made significant concessions in the last 48 hours, including on the controversial issue of fisheries. Initially Britain wanted to retain sovereignty over a number of fishing zones, while Europe sought the right to conduct industrial fishing there for several EU countries.

The current US President Donald Trump signed a draft budget for fiscal year 2021 (which began Oct. 1) totaling up to $2.3 trillion, including a nearly $900 billion economic stimulus package in response to the pandemic.

The presidential approval of this document avoids the so-called "shutdown" - a partial government suspension, which could have begun on Tuesday and would have affected several million civil servants if an additional interim resolution on extending funding had not been passed. In addition, the adoption of the budget allows for the extension of two programs to help the unemployed in a pandemic, which expired on Saturday night.

The cryptocurrency market continues to fly into the stratosphere amid the bitcoin rally, which renews all-time highs on a daily basis.

After a short "break" in the area of peaks at the end of 2017 bitcoin rushed up again and ends 2020 with a series of absolute records.

Having broken through $20,000 on December 16, the next day the exchange rate expressly passed the marks of $21,000 and $22,000, setting an interim high at $23,629 per unit.

But it also lasted less than a week. On December 25, bitcoin broke through $24,000; on Saturday, December 26, it rose above $25,000, and on Sunday, December 27, it set a new all-time high at $28,028.

The exchange rate has soared 5.6 times from its lows in March and has added 290 percent since the beginning of the year. As a result, bitcoin's capitalization reached $493 billion, exceeding the market value of such multinational giants as Visa and Samsung.

If bitcoin were an economy, it would enter the TOP-30 of the largest in the world in terms of GDP - between Belgium (25th place, $502 billion) and Nigeria (26th place, 443 billion).

Closely monitor the news background and be prepared for all the surprises of the market.