Tag Archive: China

An Unexpected (And Rotten) Branch of the Maestro’s Legacy

2017-10-29

China Fixed Asset Investment, March 1998 - Sep 2017

The most significant part of China’s 19th Party Congress ended in the usual anticlimactic fashion. These events are for show, not debate. Like any good trial lawyer will tell you, you never ask a question in court that you don’t already know the answer to. For China’s Communists, that meant nominating Xi Jinping’s name to be written into the Communist constitution with the votes already tallied.

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The World’s Largest ICO Is Imploding After Just 3 Months

2017-10-26

by Tyler Durden

2017-10-26

Earlier this summer, Tezos smashed existing sales records in the white-hot IPO market after the company’s pitch to build a better blockchain for cryptocurrencies made it one of the buzziest ICOs in the world. As we noted at the time, the company capitalized on that buzz by courting VC firms and other institutional investors with a $50 million token pre-sale. After the company opened up selling to the broader public, demand soared as investors...

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A Look Inside The Secret Swiss Bunker Where The Ultra Rich Hide Their Bitcoins

2017-10-25

by Tyler Durden

2017-10-25

Somewhere in the mountains near Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne lies a hidden underground vault containing a vast fortune. It’s no ordinary vault, according to Quartz. Built inside a decommissioned Swiss military bunker dug into a granite mountain, it’s precise location is a closely guarded secret, and access is limited by myriad security precautions.

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Global Inflation Continues To Underwhelm

2017-10-19

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-10-19

Another Side of China, Aug 2016 - Oct 2017

Chinese producer prices accelerated in September 2017, while consumer price increases slowed. The National Bureau of Statistics reported this weekend that China’s PPI was up 6.9% year-over-year, a quicker pace than the 6.3% estimated for August and a 5.5% rate in July. Earlier in the year producer prices were driven mostly by 2016’s oil rebound, along with those in the rest of the global economy, but in recent months there has been more influence...

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China Exports/Imports: Enforcing A Global Speed Limit

2017-10-18

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-10-18

Chinese imports rose 18.7% in September 2017 year-over-year. That’s up from 13.5% growth in August. While near-20% expansion sounds good if not exhilarating, it isn’t materially different from 13.5% or 8% for that matter. In addition, Chinese trade statistics tend to vary month to month.

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Neck and Neck: Russian and Chinese Official Gold Reserves

2017-10-17

by Ronan Manly

2017-10-17

Russian Central Bank Gold Reserves, 1994 - 2016

Official gold reserve updates from the Russian and Chinese central banks are probably one of the more closely watched metrics in the gold world. After the US, Germany, Italy and France, the sovereign gold holdings of China and Russia are the world’s 5th and 6th largest. And with the gold reserves ‘official figures’ of the US, Germany, Italy and France being essentially static, the only numbers worth watching are those of China and Russia.

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Noisy PMI’s In China

2017-10-14

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-10-14

China Manufacturing PMI, March 2007 - Sep 2017

In the US our economic data for a few months at least will be on shaky ground due to the lingering economic impacts of severe hurricanes. In China, the potential for irregularity is perhaps as great, though it has nothing to do with the weather. In a little over a week, Communist Party officials will gather for their 19th Party Congress.

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Dollar Surge Continues Ahead Of Jobs Report; Europe Dips As Catalan Fears Return

2017-10-07

by Tyler Durden

2017-10-07

World stocks eased back from record highs and fell for the first time in eight days, as jitters about Catalonia’s independence push returned while bets on higher U.S. interest rates sent the dollar to its highest since mid August; S&P 500 futures were modestly in the red - as they have been every day this week before levitating to record highs - ahead of hurricane-distorted nonfarm payrolls data (full preview here). U.S. jobs report will also be...

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Hard Assets In An Age Of Negative Interest Rates

2017-10-04

by Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna

2017-10-04

Time is the soul of money, the long-view - its immortality. Hard assets are forever, even when destroyed by the cataclysms of history. It is the outlook that perpetuated the most competent and powerful aristocracies in continental Europe, well up through World War I and, in certain prominent cases, beyond; it is the mindset that has sustained the most fiscally serious democratic republic in the Western world, that of Switzerland.

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“This Is A Crisis Greater Than Any Government Can Handle”: The $400 Trillion Global Retirement Gap

2017-10-03

by John Mauldin

2017-10-03

Size of the retirement savings gap, 2015 - 2050

Today we’ll continue to size up the bull market in governmental promises. As we do so, keep an old trader’s slogan in mind: “That which cannot go on forever, won’t.” Or we could say it differently: An unsustainable trend must eventually stop. Lately I have focused on the trend in US public pension funds, many of which are woefully underfunded and will never be able to pay workers the promised benefits, at least without dumping a huge and unwelcome...

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Not Political Risk For China, But Unwelcome Reality

2017-10-01

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-10-01

China’s Communist Party concluded the Third Plenum of its 18th Congress in November 2013. It was the much-discussed reform mandate that many in the West took to mean another positive step toward neo-liberal reform. At its center was supposed to be a greater role for markets particularly in the central task of resource allocation. In some places, the Party’s General Secretary Xi Jinping was hailed as the great Chinese reformer.

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The Global Housing Bubble Is Biggest In These Cities

2017-09-30

by Tyler Durden

2017-09-30

Two years ago, when UBS looked at the world's most expensive housing markets, it found that London and Hong Kong were the only two areas exposed to bubble risk.What a difference just a couple of years makes, because in the latest report by UBS wealth Management, which compiles the bank's Global Real Estate Bubble Index, it found that eight of the world's largest cities are now subject to a massive speculative housing bubble.

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It Was Collateral, Not That We Needed Any More Proof

2017-09-30

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-30

Eleven days ago, we asked a question about Treasury bills and haircuts. Specifically, we wanted to know if the spike in the 4-week bill’s equivalent yield was enough to trigger haircut adjustments, and therefore disrupt the collateral chain downstream. Within two days of that move in bills, the GC market for UST 10s had gone insane.To be honest, it was a rhetorical exercise.

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Little Behind CNY

2017-09-28

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-28

The framing is a bit clumsy, but the latest data in favor of the artificial CNY surge comes to us from Bloomberg. The mainstream views currency flows as, well, flows of currency. That’s what makes their description so maladroit, and it can often lead to serious confusion. A little translation into the wholesale eurodollar reality, however, clears it up nicely.

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PBOC RMB Restraint Derives From Experience Plus ‘Dollar’ Constraint

2017-09-27

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-27

Given that today started with a review of the “dollar” globally as represented by TIC figures and how that is playing into China’s circumstances, it would only be fitting to end it with a more complete examination of those. We know that the eurodollar system is constraining Chinese monetary conditions, but all through this year the PBOC has approached that constraint very differently than last year.

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Swimming The ‘Dollar’ Current (And Getting Nowhere)

2017-09-26

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-26

The People’s Bank of China reported this week that its holdings of foreign assets fell slightly again in August 2017. Down about RMB 21 billion, almost identical to the RMB 22 billion decline in July, the pace of forex withdrawals is clearly much preferable to what China’s central bank experienced (intentionally or not) late last year at ten and even twenty times the rate of July and August.

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Swiss National Bank Bubble Regains Lead Over Bitcoin

2017-09-22

by Tyler Durden

2017-09-22

But as Bitcoin rebounded from its China challenges, it overtook The SNB once again as bubbliest bubble. However, a 13% spike in the share price of The Swiss National Bank today has put an end to that leaving the central bank back in first place among the melter-uppers...

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A Clear Anchor

2017-09-21

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-21

China Fixed Asses Investment, 2014 - 2016

All the way back in January I calculated the total size of China’s 2016 fiscal “stimulus.” Starting in January 2016, authorities conducted what was an enormous spending program. As it had twice before, the government directed increased “investment” from State-owned Enterprises (SOE). By my back-of-the-envelope numbers, the scale of this fiscal side program was about RMB 1.45 trillion, or nearly 2% of GDP

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One-Tenth Of Global GDP Is Now Held In Offshore Tax Havens

2017-09-19

by Tyler Durden

2017-09-19

Accurately measuring the scope of global wealth inequality is a notoriously difficult undertaking – a fact that was brought to light last year when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers, exposing clients of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

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Moscow Rules (for ‘dollars’)

2017-09-02

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-02

In Ian Fleming’s 1959 spy novel Goldfinger, he makes mention of the Moscow Rules. These were rules-of-thumb for clandestine agents working during the Cold War in the Soviet capital, a notoriously difficult assignment. Among the quips included in the catalog were, “everyone is potentially under opposition control” and “do not harass the opposition.” Fleming’s book added another, “Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is an enemy...

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