Business

The hype surrounding the credit-fueled resurgence in base metals in the first half of 2017 has crashed and burned on the altar of reality in China's slowdown with industrial metals from copper to iron ore and zinc all plunging in the last two weeks. Odd that we don't hear much from mainstream business media discussing the implications for a global coordinated economic growth narrative...

Since the start of September, industrial metals have been hammered (as stocks soared)...

Iron Ore prices have crashed into a bear market...

Over two years ago, on an otherwise uneventful Thursday in May 2015, shares of Avon Products suddenly jumped 20% leaving investors stunned. The catalyst was quickly discovered: a filing recently uploaded to Edgar, the SEC’s public filings database and purportedly from London-based “PTG Capital”, claimed that the "private-equity" firm was bidding to take Avon private. Upon closer inspection, investors noticed a series of glaring, suspicious errors. For one, the document was riddled the spelling mistakes – the firm’s own name, consisting of a three-letter acronym – was repeatedly misspelled.

One day after the much anticipated Fed announcement in which Yellen unveiled the "Great Unwinding" of a decade of aggressive stimulus, it has been a mostly quiet session as the Fed's intentions had been widely telegraphed (besides the December rate hike which now appears assured), despite a spate of other central bank announcements, most notably out of Japan and Norway, both of which kept policy unchanged as expected.

Four months after Moody's downgraded China to A1 from Aa3, unwittingly launching a startling surge in the Yuan as Beijing set forth to "prove" just how "stable" China truly is through its nationalized capital markets, moments ago S&P followed suit when the rating agency also downgraded China from AA- to A+ for the first time since 1999 citing risks from soaring debt growth, less than a month before the most important congress for Chiina's communist leadership in the past five years is set to take place.

Authored by Andrei Akulov via The Strategic Culture Foundation,