Tag Archives: China

Around the world, central banks continue to cut interest rates and buy bonds to stimulate their sluggish economies. China is no exception to the monetary policy trend, with the People’s Bank of China cutting rates seven times since late 2014. But here’s the twist: Whereas for most corporates, borrowing costs have been falling in lockstep with central bank moves, a recent spike in defaults has left investors in Chinese corporate bonds on edge. At a time when the cost of money has...

The last time we wrote about the long-running saga of the scandalous collapse and constant corruption at the Malaysian state wealth fund, 1MDB, which also happened to be an unconfirmed slush fund for president Najib, was a month ago when we learned that the NY bank regulator was looking into fundraising by the fund’s favorite bank, Goldman Sachs. Then overnight, the story which already seemed like it has every possible...

Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com, While everyone was talking about Brexit last month, the Bank for International Settlements released its 86th annual report. Based in Basel, Switzerland, the BIS functions as a master hub for all the world’s central banks. It settles transactions among central banks and other international organizations. It doesn’t serve private individuals, businesses, or national...

Via The Mises Institute, [An interview with Hans-Herman Hoppe in the Polish weekly Najwy?szy Czas!] What is your assessment of contemporary Western Europe, and in particular the EU? All major political parties in Western Europe, regardless of their different names and party programs, are nowadays committed to the same fundamental idea of democratic socialism. They use democratic elections to legitimize the taxing...

 Swiss Franc While the yen remained weak, the other major safe-haven, the Swiss Franc had gains. We often emphasized the main differences: The Swiss have a far higher trade surplus per capita The Swiss government does not do fiscal experiments like helicopter money, the SNB does only the monetary part. While the Swiss monetary stimulus is higher than the Japanese one. The effect of FX interventions is stronger than...

The following article by David Haggith was first published on the Great Recession Blog. Summer vacation is here, and the whole global family has arrived at Central-Bank Wonderland, the upside-down, inside-out world that banksters and their puppet politicians call “recovery.” Everyone is talking about it as wizened traders puzzle over how stocks and bonds soared, hand-in-hand, in face of the following list of economic...

Gold With both stocks and US Treasury prices at all time highs the market is sensing that something has to give, and that something may just be more QE, which likely explains the move higher in gold to coincide with both risk and risk-haven assets. As of moments ago, gold rose above $1,370, and was back to levels not seen since 2014. Curiously, the move higher is taking place after Friday’s “stellar” jobs report,...

Last Thursday, when we reported that Ben Bernanke was to "secretly" meet with Kuroda and Abe this week (he is said to have already met with Japan's central bank head earlier today), we said that "something big was coming" out of Japan which had "helicopter money" on the agenda.  And sure enough, after a dramatic victory for Abe in Japan's upper house elections which gave his party an even greater majority, Abe announced the first hints of helicopter money when Nikkei reported, and Abe...

Summary: Electoral politics remains significant. BOE is likely to cut rates, while BoC may tilt more dovishly. US Q2 earnings season formally begins. Investors are under siege.  A growing proportion of bonds in Europe and Japan offer negative yields. The German and Japanese curves are negative out 15-years, while one cannot find a positive yield among any tenor of Swiss government bonds.   Despite a string of...

Chinese wholesale gold demand, as measured by withdrawals from the vaults of the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), reached a sizable 973 metric tonnes in the first half of 2016, down 7 % compared to last year. Although Chinese gold demand year to date at 973 tonnes is slightly down from its record year in 2015 – when China in total net imported over 1,550 tonnes and an astonishing 2,596 tonnes were withdrawn from SGE...