Morning brief: the inflation relief has an asterisk

US inflation fell hard — in a month that no longer exists. June CPI, released Tuesday: headline inflation down to 3.5% from May's 4.2%, the first drop in five months, with prices falling 0.4% on the month — the largest monthly decline since April 2020. The driver was energy: gasoline alone fell 9.7% on the month, because June was the month the US–Iran ceasefire reopened the Strait of Hormuz and oil slid. Here's the asterisk: Trump declared that ceasefire over on 8 July, oil jumped the same day, and none of that is in this report.

Morgan Stanley moved its crypto ETFs a step closer. The bank revised its filings for a spot Ethereum Trust and a Solana Trust this week: Coinbase would hold the assets and facilitate staking, with BNY Mellon as joint custodian, and both funds carry a 0.14% sponsor fee. That would put staking inside a mainstream ETF wrapper — pending, as ever, the SEC's sign-off.

Two rate decisions land within a week — and the Fed isn't celebrating. Chairman Kevin Warsh has spent his first weeks vowing to tackle inflation, and one soft month won't change that; after the release, CME's FedWatch put roughly an 86% probability on rates staying at 3.5–3.75% at the 29 July meeting. The ECB goes first, next Thursday 23 July — its first meeting since June's surprise hike took the deposit rate to 2.25%. For savers: central-bank rates staying up is what keeps the interest on uninvested cash at brokers up too.

Interactive Brokers turned on crypto withdrawals — for Americans. IBKR now offers roughly 30 tokens and lets clients move money out to their own wallets via stablecoins (USDC, PayPal USD, Ripple USD), near-instant and around the clock. Before you go looking for the button: the release says bidirectional stablecoin funding is not available to UK or Ireland clients, and the new tokens exclude Ireland too.

And a Czech deadline we're watching. Polymarket went onto the Czech blocked-gambling register on 13 July; providers have 15 days to actually cut it off, which lands around 28 July. Until then the site opens normally from Czech connections — we mapped that gap between "banned" and "blocked" across nine countries in our Polymarket piece.

That's the brief. Sources below, as always — this is a summary of what was published, not investment advice.