Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds, and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

Got all that? Great, let's talk about what we went over today:

• Chinese markets-china-loan-prime-rate-japan-trade-data-oil-and-currencies.html">stocks were up, Ant is going public in both Hong Kong and Shanghai, and eBay is looking to offload its classified-ads unit for $8 billion.
• The efforts to make TikTok appear apolitical are struggling after its parent company does something very political.
• Xpeng, a Chinese EV company, added $500 million to its Series C round.
• Coming up: TechCrunch Early Stage, which is going to rule, and a host of earnings results from companies like Microsoft, Snap, Intel, among others.
• Funding rounds from Vestr, Mori, Soterea, and Burn To Give. More notes on the Vestr round here, Mori here, Soterea here, and Burn To Give here.

And we closed the show with a short thought-bubble on manias. What constitutes a bubble? I don't know precisely, but the electric car (EV) industry has certainly seen its fair share of ups and downs. China's EV market has see its booms and busts, with the IPO of Nio operating as a good example of enthusiasm (its IPO), declining faith (its later cratering share price), and the rebirth of optimism (its recent return-to-form) in its industry.

Xpeng's huge new Series C+ round and the huge valuation that Tesla has managed as a public company in recent months add currency to the idea that the EV market has once again swung towards too much optimism. We'll see.

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.