So Kobe Steel was not an isolated incident and faking data on manufacturing quality in Japan is quite common, as other lower profile scandals at Nissan Motor and Takata proved. Today another culprit has come to light: Mitsubishi Materials – which may need to re-consider its corporate philosophy “For People, Society and the Earth” and Articles 2 and 3 of its code of conduct “Safety First” and “Compliance”.
Zhou Xiaochuan’s long reign as PBoC Governor is drawing to a close. He signaled his impending retirement last month and will be seventy years old In January 2018. Zhou has headed up China’s central bank from the early days of China’s “growth miracle” in 2002 and successfully – thanks to massive credit creation - steered China’s economy through the 2008 crisis.
Since then, he’s kept China’s horrendous credit bubble on the rails, while warning of the risk of a “Minsky moment” at the recent Party Congress.
The manager of Old Mutual Gold & Silver Fund, a precious metals fund with over $220 mln under control has said Bitcoin is “paving the way” for a global gold comeback.
Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview published today, Ned Naylor-Leyland said that the marriage of Bitcoin and gold was essentially a logical one given the characteristics and remit of both.
“Bitcoin was explicitly designed to be digital gold,” he said.
Following the market lockdown during October’s Party Congress, many commentators were disturbed by the continued rise in Chinese government bond yields as we returned to “business as usual”, with the 10-year rising to 4%. At the beginning of this month, we discussed the sell-off (see “China: Shadow Bank Inflows Are Critical To Sustain The Ponzi…But They’re Falling”) and noted a useful insight from the Wall Street Journal.
2017 has seen the biggest drop in American firearms sales in history.
After 8 years of almost incessant rises in NICS Firearms Checks (a proxy for 'legal' arms sales) under President Obama...
source: NICS
2017 has seen a considerable drop (year-to-date) - the biggest on NICS records...
source: NICS