Business

Submitted by Etai Friedman via Palisade-Research.com,

After the stock market crash of 1987, The Federal Reserve embarked on a path that led to the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. The day after the 1987 crash (Oct. 20, 1987) Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed, announced to the world that The Fed stood ready to provide whatever liquidity was needed by the banking system to prevent the crash from turning into a systemic financial crisis. That was the day the Fed “put” was born.

The last few weeks have seen Hong Kong's Hang Seng index surge over 14% which - if one believes the mainstream media - must mean renewed confidence in world economic growth and that everything is awesome. However, that narrative just got destroyed as Hong Kong retail sales in February just crashed by the most since 1999 as fewer Chinese tourists visited the city during the Lunar New Year holiday and as one analyst warned, sales will "continue to fall for the rest of 2016 as all the negative factors won’t be solved in the near term."

Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Having glad-handed with President Obama just this morning, and complained of a "sluggish global economy," that ironically his credit-fuelled mal-investment maelstrom enabled via its deflationary forces, Chinese President Xi appears to have moved on from currency wars to protectionism as WSJ reports China is tightening its grip on cross-border e-commerce, imposing a new tax system on all overseas purchases.

Several days ago, we explained how China's bizarro M&A scramble was nothing more than a rushed attempt to park as much capital in the US (and offshore) as possible before Beijing gets wise enough and cracks down on this latest loophole to evade Chinese capital controls, we had this to say about the farcical, and now pulled, $14 billion Anbang offer for Starwood, owner of the W Hotels, Sheraton and St Regis brands: