Business

Almost exactly two years ago, in April 2014, Greece issued €2.5 billion in 5 year bond yielding around 5%, which was met with huge investor interest and ended up being 8x oversubscribed. Fast forward to today when another former shutout from global bond markets, Argentina, is in the FT's words, "on the cusp of one of the most anticipated comebacks in recent history, as the Latin American country ends a 15-year exile from the international debt market with a multibillion-dollar sale."

This article from the May/June 2016 issue hasn’t yet been published online. For now, it’s just available to subscribers—to read it right away, subscribe here and access the digital edition of the magazine. If you’re already a subscriber, log in here.

Having already exposed the fakeness of China's most recent trade data (and implicitly its GDP data), we were not entirely stunned by the fact that, as Bloomberg's Tom Orlik reports, China’s growth rates for quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year GDP for the past year don’t match.

So to start with, we have this entirely unsustainable "data"...

Over the weekend, Bloomberg View's quasi-economist wrote his latest laughable article, one which supposedly "explained" how "Everyone Worries Too Much About 'Black Swans'", which in addition to being a rambling, meandering stream of consciousness that as is regularly the case with this particular author, made little sense, sparked a Twitter feud with the Nassim Taleb, the person who made the concept of a Black Swan into a household name.

The world has not yet full realized the magnitude of the slowdown in China.

The “official” China growth numbers claim the Chinese economy is plowing along at 6%. I use quotations around the word “official” because Chinese economic data points are complete fiction.

Indeed, back in 2007, no less than current First Vice Premiere of China, Li Keqiang, admitted to the US ambassador to China that ALL Chinese data, outside of electricity consumption, railroad cargo, and bank lending is for “reference only.”