Business

In the aftermath of last week's disappointing G-20 Shanghai summit, there was much riding on this weekend's start of the China's People's Congress, and specifically what if any stimulus announcement Beijing will make; sadly for stimulus addicts China mostly disappointed and after the unimaginative scope of growth proposals, it is hardly surprising that European stocks and US equity futures have taken a leg lower, even if Chinese stocks rose and certain commodities such as Iron Ore soared overnight on hopes China will either "rationalize" capacity or at least build some more roads to nowhere

It looks like Twitter is at war with online hacktivists waging war on ISIS. According to Twitter the enemy of ISIS is my enemy. Twitter has banned online activists from taking on the Islamic State (#OpISIS campaign) by suspending their accounts instead of the accounts of  ISIS supporters’, under “anti-harassment” rules. Russia Today reports: An Anonymous hacker made the claims after Twitter said it suspended 125,000 accounts for “threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS” since mid-2015. Who Suspended 125,000 Twitter accounts?

After three consecutive declines in China's Foreign Reserves in the November-January period, which averaged nearly $100 billion per month (with particular attention paid to last month's number), consensus expectations were for a moderation in reserve outflows in February to approximately $40 billion in February; moments ago the PBOC reported, that as expected, reserve outflow "slowed down" to just $28.6 billion, bringing China's total foreign reserves to $3.2 trillion, the lowest level since early 2012.

Goldman does it again.

Just hours after the central banker-spawning investment bank issued a report in which it said the iron ore rally is likely to be short lived "in the absence of a material increase in Chinese steel demand, and steel raw materials will once again drive steel prices rather than the other way around", overnight Iron Ore futures traded on the Singapore SGX exploded as much as 19% higher to $58.95 in one session.

As central bank policy-makers' forecasts have become more pessimistic (i.e. more realistic), Lord Rothschild is unsurprised at the current malaise: "not surprisingly, market conditions have deteriorated further...So much so that the wind is certainly not behind us; indeed we may well be in the eye of a storm." On this basis, Rothschild highlights a "daunting litany of problems," warning those who are optimistically sanguine about the US economy that "2016 is likely to turn out to be more difficult than the second half of 2015."