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• The dollar stood tall on Tuesday as a rout in global equities prompted anxious investors to cut exposure to riskier assets and seek shelter in the relative safety of the greenback.

The U.S. currency held firm against most of its counterparts, although it slipped against the yen, which is viewed as a safe haven in times of market turmoil due to Japan’s current account surplus.

The dollar slipped to as low as 108.46 yen as the shakeout in equities persisted in Tuesday’s Asian trade, but later pared its losses and last changed hands at 108.93 yen, down 0.1 percent on the day.

The dollar’s index against a basket of six major currencies stood at 89.605. Since Friday, when the selloff in equities began in earnest, the index has gained about 1.1 percent.

The euro edged up 0.1 percent to $1.2384, regaining a bit of footing after shedding 0.7 percent on Monday.

• The 10-year U.S. Treasuries yield rose to as high as 2.885 percent on Monday, its highest in four years and 47 basis points above the 2.411 percent seen at the end of 2017.

But a massive fall in share prices prompted an about-turn, and in Asian trade on Tuesday, it fell back to as low as 2.662 percent.

Fed fund futures are now pricing in only two rate hikes this year, a sea change from only a few days ago when they priced in about 80 percent chance of three hikes with the market even rife with talk of four hikes.

The CBOE Volatility index, the closely followed “fear-index” measure of expected near-term stock market volatility jumped 20 points to 30.71, its highest since August 2015.

• Bitcoin slid another 13 percent to below $6,000 on Tuesday, bringing the world’s best-known cryptocurrency’s losses to more than half since the start of 2018.

Bitcoin has fallen heavily in recent sessions as worries about a regulatory clampdown on the nascent market and panicked investors push prices lower. The virtual currency hit a peak of almost $20,000 in December.

On the Luxembourg-based bitstamp exchange, bitcoin fell to as low as $5,920, its lowest level since mid-November, before recovering slightly. Other cryptocurrencies have also dropped sharply in value this week

• On day one, markets are already putting Fed Chair Jerome Powell to the test.

Market volatility, largely absent until last week, picked up in the final days of Janet Yellen's tenure, with interest rates suddenly breaking out of a long-running range. Long dormant, inflation expectations suddenly started to rise and triggered a sell-off in the Treasury market.

Yields, which move opposite price, shot higher, spooking stocks. The Dow, after a bruising 666 point loss Friday, was sharply lower Monday in volatile trading, dropping more than 1,500 points at one point before coming back.

The market action can't all be blamed on Powell's ascension to Fed chair, but he will have little or no honeymoon period before being expected to raise interest rates and continue the unwind of the Fed's balance sheet. Yellen didn't raise interest rates for nearly two years into her term, but then did hike five times as well as initiating the program late last year to scale back the central bank's massive balance sheet.

"There's a confluence of factors, one of them being we have a new Fed chair," said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies. "There was the feeling Janet Yellen would always bail out the market. That was the notion during her tenure. Powell seems more inclined to let markets do what they do."

• Several of U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyers have advised him not to sit down for an interview with a special counsel investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times reported on Monday.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that no decision had yet been made on whether Trump would agree to an interview.

If the president refuses to sit for an interview, Mueller could subpoena the president to testify before a grand jury. A subpoena could trigger a court fight that might ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.

• Egypt’s gold reserves rose by $135 million or 5 percent month-on-month in January 2018, according to the Central Bank of Egypt's (CBE) data on Monday.

The value of the precious metal stood at $2.8 billion at the end of January, compared to $2.67 billion in December 2017.

• Yoshinori Shigemi, market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, said the specter of inflation will gradually undermine the attraction of equities even though the markets could rebound in the short term.

“In the end, the Fed will have to hike rates. And if it doesn‘t, long-dated bonds will be sold off on worries about inflation. Either way, that is going to slow down the economy. Rising wages also mean corporate profit margins will be squeezed gradually down the road,” he said.

Keen to avoid further risk, investors are closing their positions in other assets, including the currency market where a popular strategy has been to sell the dollar against the euro and other currencies seen as benefiting from higher interest rates in the future.