Authored by Danielle DiMartino Booth via Bloomberg.com,
Oh, but for the days the hawks had a hero in Sydney. Against the backdrop of a de facto currency war, the Reserve Bank of Australia stood as a steady pillar of strength. The RBA held the line on interest rates, maintaining a floor of 2.5 percent, even as its global central bank peers drove rates to the zero bound and beyond into negative territory.
According to the latest data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), sales of Electrically Chargeable Vehicles (which include plug-in hybrids) in Q1 of 2017 were brisk across much of Europe: they rose by 80% Y/Y in eco-friendly Sweden, 78% in Germany, just over 40% in Belgium and grew by roughly 30% across the European Union... but not in Denmark: here sales cratered by over 60% for one simple reason: the government phased out taxpayer subsidies.
Beijing's ability and eagerness, to create and roll from one bubble, whether it is in housing, equities, commodities, cars, bitcoin and so on, into the next has been extensively documented, however, of all recurring bubbles to impact the Chinese economy, housing is by far the most important.
The following article by David Haggith was first published on The Great Recession Blog:
We just saw a major rift open in the US stock market that we haven’t seen since the dot-com bust in 1999. While the Dow rose by almost half a percent to a new all-time high, the NASDAQ, because it is heavier tech stocks, plunged almost 2%. Tech stocks nosedived while others rose to create new highs. Is this a one-off, or has a purge begun for the tech stocks that have driven the nation’s third-longest bull market?
Authored by Brian Maher via The Daily Reckoning,
We open today’s reckoning with a hypothesis:
The current monetary system debauches the culture.
Long-suffering readers are familiar with our… diminished regard for paper money.
Paper money — or digital money nowadays — is the great bogeyman of the boom/bust cycle. It inflates bubbles of every model and make.
Meanwhile, paper money fuels big government… as oxygen fuels fire.