It didn't take much to fizzle Friday's Japan NIRP-driven euphoria, when first ugly Chinese manufacturing (and service) PMI data reminded the world just what the bull in the, well, China shop is...
... leading to a 1.8% drop on the first day of February after Chinese stocks slid 23% in January with the nation’s manufacturing sector faces strong galewind challenges as the government plans to reduce excess industrial capacity and unleash troubling mass unemployment, while a weakening currency is spurring capital outflows.
Following Kuroda's panic policy measures from Friday, JGB yields continue to collapse across the curve (though notably 30Y is selling off - is someone actually concerned about long-term survival risk?). 2Y Yields have collapsed all the way to BoJ's -10bps rate, 5Y is plunging - now close to -9bps, and 10Y has dropped 20bps to just over 6bps... with BofA warning a negative 10Y rate looms.
In a moment of curious serendipity, a little over 90 minutes after we showed what a dystopian, centrally-planned, cashless society unleashed in a negative interest rate world would look like ("by forcing people and companies to convert their paper money into bank deposits, the hope is that they can be persuaded (coerced?) to spend that money rather than save it because those deposits will carry considerable costs"), and briefly after we laid out the countless recent warnings from "very serious people" that cash is evil and should be banned:
One month ago, we first revealed that for one prominent winner from the subprime crisis, Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass, "the greatest investment opportunity right now" is to short the Chinese Yuan: as he explained "given our views on credit contraction in Asia, and in China in particular, let's say they are going to go through a banking loss cycle like we went through during the Great Financial Crisis, there's one thing that is going to happen: China is going to have to dramatically devalue its currency." He even went so far as to give a timeframe: "we thi