Asia

Once again, China was faced with the unpleasant task of deciding which asset class to intervene in: its plunging stock market, or its currency. It chose the latter, and as a result after a turbulent start the Shanghai Composite sank by 5.3% to close just above 3000 and down 15% in just the past 11 days, suggesting that the PBOC is increasingly seeing the CNY1.8 trillion (at least) spent to stabilize stocks as a sunk cost.

It all started off relatively well: oil and US equity futures were buoyant on hopes Iran and Saudi Arabia would break out in a bloody conflict any minute boosting the net worth of shareholders of the military industrial complex, and then, out of nowhere, like a depressed China in a bull shop, the "mainland" crashed the party following a terrible manufacturing PMI report, which sent Chinese stocks sliding slowly at first, then very fast.

Even before Glencore made a dramatic appearance on the world's distressed commodity trader stage in late August, Zero Hedge readers were familiar with its Asian cousin, Noble Group, also known as Asia's largest commodity trader, a name we covered in our August 18 report "Noble Group’s Kurtosis Awakening Moment For The Commodity Markets."

The main purpose of this article is to bring to USA government's attention that " Pivot to Asia" policy is far more dangerous than they expected, because China may use this policy reversely to trigger U.S.'s crisis.