This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Stocks under pressureU.S. stocks fell Thursday, their third losing day in a row. The 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.284%, the highest since October. Asia-Pacific markets retreated Friday as investors digested more bad news about China’s real estate sector. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index lost around 1.4% while the mainland Shanghai Composite inched down 0.3%. Separately, Japan’s headline inflation in July held steady at 3.3%.

China’s property troublesEvergrande Group, a heavily indebted Chinese property developer, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in a U.S. court Thursday. The statute protects non-U.S. companies that are undergoing restructuring from creditors. It’s another stark sign of how China’s property sector hasn’t improved since its slump in 2020, intensifying calls for policymakers to step in.

Bright spots in Chinese economyChina’s economy may be struggling, but there are bright spots in the consumer economy, according to earnings reports from big Chinese companies. JD.com saw electric and home appliance revenues rise 11.3%, Tencent saw 150% year-on-year growth in gross merchandise value and Alibaba’s Tmall sales increased 21% year over year to 30.16 billion yuan ($4.1 billion).

Bitcoin plungesBitcoin fell sharply to $26,308, its lowest level in almost two months, after minutes of the Federal Reserve’s July meeting were released. The Fed’s warning that sustained inflation could lead to more rate hikes — and a higher chance of an engineered recession — probably triggered a sell-off in risky assets like cryptocurrency, said Sylvia Jablonski, chief investment officer at Defiance ETFs.

[PRO] Headwinds in AugustThe S&P 500 is down 4% so far this month, putting it on pace for its worst one-month decline since December. There are a few factors for the slump: zero-day options, weak technicals and a weak Chinese economy. CNBC Pro’s Fred Imbert breaks down each headwind and gives suggestions on how investors can protect their portfolios.

Rising U.S. Treasury yields are straining stocks. Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s July meeting triggered the 10-year yield to rise more than 2 basis points to hit its highest level in almost a year. But at 4.282%, it’s still lower than the benchmark interest rate of 5.25% to 5.5%.

That’s not even taking into account the last rate hike that the Fed had projected for the year, which would take rates to a range of 5.5% to 5.75%. Investors had hoped — and bet — that the Fed would stop hiking after its meeting in July.

Those bets are slowly unwinding. There’s a 33.2% chance that the Fed will increase rates by 25 basis points at its November meeting, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.  Those odds were only 27.8% a week ago.

And with rates possibly going higher than that if inflation resurges — as the Fed warned in its minutes — yields could climb further still.

Investors didn’t like the sound of that. The S&P 500 lost 0.77%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.84% and the Nasdaq Composite declined 1.17%. All three indexes closed below their 50-day moving average — the first time for the Dow since June.

Trading was brisk, too, suggesting investors sold off stocks because they feared more losses. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF, a fund that tracks the S&P index, traded 95.3 million shares, above its 30-day moving volume of 72.4 million

Indeed, investor sentiment nosedived this week, according to the latest American Association of Individual Investor weekly survey. Just 35.9% of investors are bullish about the next six months, down from 44.7% last week and 49% two weeks ago. The decline snapped a 10-week streak when bullishness had exceeded the historical average of 37.5%, the AAII said.

It’d be a stretch of the imagination, however, to say that a bear market is back. All indexes are still above their 200-day moving average. The S&P is around 9.31% off its record high and has rallied about 14% this year. It’s important to keep in mind that August has historically been a slow, and bad month for stocks. But August is just one month.

— CNBC’s Scott Schnipper contributed to this report

SEC Chair Gary Gensler stepped up his attack on the crypto industry this week, suing Coinbase and Binance for securities violations and casting doubt on the future of token trading.

Crypto investors took the hint. Four of the 10 most valuable coins plunged in value by at least 15% this week, according to CoinMarketCap, a sell-off sparked by the lawsuits and Gensler’s interview with CNBC on Tuesday, in which he said “we don’t need more digital currency.”

In alleging that Coinbase was acting as an unregistered broker and exchange, the Securities and Exchange Commission said at least 13 crypto assets available to the company’s customers were considered “crypto asset securities.” They include Solana’s SOL token, Cardano’s ADA token, Polygon’s MATIC coin and Protocol Labs’ Filecoin token (FIL).

Trading app Robinhood followed on Friday by announcing that, starting June 27, it will no longer support trading of coins from Cardano, Polygon and Solana. The company said “no other coins are affected.” Also on Friday, Crypto.com said it will shut down its U.S. institutional exchange.

“No other coins are affected and your crypto is still safe on Robinhood,” the company said in a post.

Cardano’s coin, the seventh-most valuable cryptocurrency, according to CoinMarketCap, tumbled 20% in the past week. Solana, ranked ninth, dropped 18%. Polygon, ranked 10th, also slid 18%. Filecoin, which is further down the list, dropped 19%. Binance’s BNB token, ranked fourth, fell 16%.

Bitcoin and ethereum, the two most popular cryptocurrencies, were more stable, each declining less than 5%.

Gensler, who was appointed to head the SEC by President Joe Biden in 2021, has spent much of the past year going after crypto firms and exchanges for effectively selling highly speculative and risky securities dressed up as something else.

From high-profile fraud cases involving Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Do Kwon’s Terraform Labs to dozens of charges involving coin offerings and alleged false marketing, Gensler has made the once-burgeoning crypto industry his primary takedown target.

“The investing public has the benefit of U.S. securities laws,” Gensler said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “Crypto should be no different, and these platforms, these intermediaries need to come into compliance.”

Gensler’s TV appearance came after the SEC sued Coinbase and said the company should be “permanently restrained and enjoined” from “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.”

Shares of Coinbase, the only major crypto exchange that’s publicly traded in the U.S., sank 18% this week. Coinbase legal chief Paul Grewal told CNBC in a statement that the SEC’s approach to enforcement without laying out clear rules is “hurting America’s economic competitiveness and companies like Coinbase that have a demonstrated commitment to compliance.”

A day earlier, in its lawsuit against Binance, the SEC alleged that the company and founder Changpeng Zhao comingled billions of dollars worth of user funds and sent them to a European company controlled by Zhao.

While Binance claims no official headquarters and does most of its business overseas, the SEC’s complaint cited a senior executive allegedly telling a compliance officer that the company was operating as a “[f—ing] unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.”

In a blog post, Binance said it was “disappointed” in the SEC’s suit and said it had “engaged in extensive good-faith discussions to reach a negotiated settlement to resolve their investigations.”

Others named in the SEC lawsuit also weighed in after this week’s charges landed.

The Cardano Foundation, which works to advance use of its namesake technology, said in a tweet that it disagrees with the labeling of its ADA coin as a security and “we look forward to the continued engagement with regulators and policymakers to achieve legal clarity and certainty on these matters.”

Protocol Labs, the developer of Filecoin, said in a series of tweets on Thursday that the token is critical to the operation of its distributed storage network. It’s how people buy storage from providers, and Protocol says the cost is much less than what users would pay Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.

“Filecoin is a cryptocurrency-powered global storage network preserving humanity’s most important information, not a security,” Protocol Labs tweeted.

In its 101-page complaint against Coinbase, the SEC made clear that regardless of whether these tokens have some level of utility, they can easily be purchased on the app by people who have no interest beyond investing. And Coinbase generates revenue by executing those trades.

“Coinbase makes these crypto assets available for trading,” the SEC said, “without restricting transactions to those who might acquire or treat the asset as anything other than as an investment.”

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