China's unprecedented crackdown against Yuan shorts continued overnight, when the FX market saw even more fireworks as the onshore yuan headed for the biggest four-day advance since 2005 following the strongest central bank fixing since January and amid ongoing speculation China's central bank is trying to crush shorts while China's big banks continue to limit offshore liquidity.
Hedge funds are jumping back into gold.
Money managers boosted their long positions in U.S. futures by the most in almost a decade in the week ended May 23, Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show.
As Bloomberg notes, bullion futures have posted three straight weekly gains, helped by U.S. and European political angst that has boosted demand for the metal as a haven.
Following yesterday's official (if less credible and focused mostly on SOEs) manufacturing and non-mfg PMI reports from China's National Bureau of Statistics, both of which came either in line or slightly better than expected, moments ago Caixin/Markit reported its own set of Chinese manufacturing data, and it was far more disappointing: at 49.6, not only did it miss expectations of 50.1, but by printing below 50, the operating conditions faced by Chinese goods producers deteriorated for the first time in nearly a year.
Less than a week after declaring that China’s economy is headed for an economic “day of reckoning” thanks to its twin asset bubbles (real estate and equity), short-seller Carson Block said he’s starting to believe there are “real problems with Canada” – particularly the country’s dangerously overvalued housing market.
Last month, we pointed that one of wall street's largest underwriters of auto debt was suddenly slashing their own holdings of auto loans while simultaneously ramping up the issuance of auto securitization facilities thereby pawning off the risk to 'suckers' who have no idea they're jumping in front of yet another financial freight train (see "Deja Vu: JPM Slashes Auto Loans For Their Own Book; Ramps Up ABS Issuance For The Suckers").