Business

The billionaire Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman and heir, Lee Jae-yong, was sentenced to five years in prison for paying bribes worth 8.9 billion won ($7.9 million) to a friend of then-president Park Geun-hye to win her support for the merger of two Samsung affiliates. The sentence marks a "watershed moment" for the country’s decades-long economic order dominated by powerful, family-run conglomerates.

Lee Jae-yong, Samsung Group heir arrives at Seoul Central District Court to hear the bribery scandal verdict on August 25, 2017

Authored by Bryce McBride,

Imagine a situation where the owner of a long-established building supply company sees his profits turning into losses with no way to turn things around.

The owner has two options.

The honest option is to acknowledge the situation and shut down and sell his inventory of goods, his buildings and his equipment. With some luck the sale will earn enough to fund a modest retirement.

 

As wages for Chinese workers’ skyrocket, the country’s manufacturers are scrambling to replace humans with machines, in many cases to preserve thin profit margins that have been choked by debt service.

But according to a report from Bloomberg Intelligence, China’s embrace of automation – its companies are installing machines faster than in any other country – could have unintended consequences for the global economy, as the robots force wages to sink, inequality to balloon, and consumption to collapse.

Besides the hilariously fabricated economic data and the whole central planning bit - both of which are now everywhere these days - the one most notable feature about China's economy and capital markets are the constantly rolling, bursting and resurrecting asset bubbles: from housing, to stocks, to bonds, to commodities, to cryptocurrencies, to pretty much anything that isn't nailed down and can be traded, and back to housing again, the lifecycle of a Chinese assets is best expressed in terms of its "tulipness": how long before the swarming horde of Chinese bubble-chasers, armed wi

Via FFWiley.com,

It seems every bank, including central banks, publishes a financial conditions index these days. And because financial conditions typically lead the economy, it makes sense to track them. In fact, they might contain even more information than they get credit for. They might offer the elusive “crystal ball” that foretells our economic fortunes.