Massive capital outflows from China in an effort to preserve capital is something that we've covered extensively in the past (here and here for example). Last month, China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) came out to do some damage control, and downplayed the extent of the activity. It also hinted that the government would "help" Chinese companies with overseas M&A in the future...
From Xinhua
The dollar's recent rapid slide has been accompanied by a constant backdrop of dovish cooing from the Fed. Until this week, SocGen's Albert Edwards notes that both equity and commodity markets had embraced the weak dollar as the elixir to solve all their ills. That relief, however, has now proved fleeting as fear of weak economic activity has reasserted its influence on investors. The weak dollar, Edwards warns, should be seen as merely a shuffling of deckchairs on the Titanic before the global economy sinks below the icy waves.
Shortly after it first went public, Zynga hit a market cap of $9 billion. Since then, the company which had such one time hits as Farmville and Words with Friends has seen its valuation crater, with its public stock now valued at roughly $2 billion. However, excluding the company's $1.5 billion in cash implies that its underlying operations are valued at about half a billion dollars. Which is ironic because that is less than the value of the San Francisco-company's based headquarters.
Following the biggest news of this weekend, the (anticipated) resignation/termination of Saudi Arabia's longstanding oil minister Ali al-Naimi, everyone has been wondering about what comes next and how this development will impact the price of oil. We laid out our preliminary thoughts as follows:
Ultimately this is not about the new oil minister: this is about Prince Mohammed taking full control over Saudi oil. So the question everyone now wants answered is "what does this mean for oil?"
When it comes to tracking the nuances at the all important margin of the gold market, few are as observant as ADMISI's Paul Mylchreest, whose December 2014 analysis showed the stunning role gold holds in the new normal as a funding "currency" for BOJ interventions in the form of a long Nikkei/short gold (and vice versa) pair trade, indicating that central banks directly intervene in gold pricing (by selling, of course) when seeking to push paper asset prices higher.