For a cabal of superpatient supergeniuses, the Chinese tend to play with fire quite often. According to many, the Communists have perfected the art of technocracy and are merely waiting out the impetuously free West. The dollar system will destroy itself (there’s the kernel of truth) allowing a perfectly positioned China to swoop in and rescue the global economy with [...]
Always aspiring to technocratic greatness, China’s Communist Party is set up to run like clockwork. It’s supposed to go off in predestined fashion, a course programmed into the vast apparatus by highly proficient experts. It is, or is supposed to be, comforting that order and control over the complex main spheres of daily life can be managed down the detail [...]
The Chinese have been reforming their monetary and credit system for decades. Liberalization has been an overriding goal, seen as necessary to accompany the processes which would keep the country’s economic “miracle” on track. Or get it back on track, as the case may be. Authorities had traditionally controlled interest rates through various limits and levers. It wasn’t until October [...]
There may yet be bitter irony in the fact that China’s nascent embrace of capitalism in the late eighties allowed it to survive the wave of failed socialist states which fell all throughout the world at the time. While the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern bloc nearly disappeared, and even the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chinese would stand almost [...]
Why don’t you fight the Fed? Sure, central banks and governments give off the impression that they are in control. The idea is repeated as if a fact. We are led to believe they let markets play around in their contained spheres but should anyone get out of hand authorities are there like referees to make sure everything remains inbounds. [...]
Toward the end of June, Chinese RMB money markets seemed like they had weathered the worst of it. One month earlier, in late May, regulators had seized Baoshang Bank Co. sending waves of uncertainty rippling through markets in China and around the world. Authorities were quick to declare “nothing to see here”, blaming the bank’s close relationship with absentee billionaire [...]
On the one hand, it’s a small silver lining in how many even in the mainstream are beginning to realize that there really is something wrong. Then again, they are using “trade wars” to make sense of how that could be. For the one, at least they’ve stopped saying China’s economy is strong and always looks resilient no matter what [...]
It’s another one of those things that just blows up the whole convention, another pretty clear sign that the mainstream has it all backward. We are seeing it play out right now with China. The Chinese are being accused of unfair currency manipulation, the sort of “competitive devaluation” that fills whole chapters in the Keynesian Economics textbooks. The idea is [...]
Right on cue, the Chinese have restarted “devaluation.” Because no one ever learns, and because trade wars are a conveniently timed distraction, CNY’s dramatic plunge below 7.00 is being written up as currency manipulation. It is manipulation, just nothing like what’s being described. PBOC Governor Yi Gang is a passenger here, not the man pulling the levers behind the scenes. [...]
We’ve got repo, erratic federal funds market, German 2s correlated with it, plunging bond yields, angry swaps (IR and FX), and economic data increasingly and more speedily in the wrong direction. Overseas official entities piled even more into the foreign repo pool, their payments dollar buffer, another definitive sign of a much more acute dollar shortage worldwide. Is it even [...]
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