Business

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

Via Greg Hunter's USA Watchdog blog,

Former Federal Reserve insider Danielle DiMartino Booth says the record high stock and bond prices make the Fed nervous because it’s fearful of popping this record high credit bubble. DiMartino Booth says,

“The Fed’s biggest fear is they know darn well this much credit has built up in the background, and the ramifications of the un-wind for what has happened since the great financial crisis is even greater than what happened in 2008 and 2009.