S&P futures are unchanged and Asian stocks closed mixed, however European stocks rebounded for first time this week, led by auto stocks after Daimler’s quarterly profit, as a break in alarming political news prompted traders to "swoop" - as Reuters puts it - on equities, cooling a safe-haven rally that saw the yen and gold at five-month highs and global government bond yields to drop their lowest this year.
Even as talk about robots taking over low-(and not so low) skilled jobs has been all the rage in recent months, few Americans have been faced with the imminent threat of being displaced by Johnny 5. Not so in China, where a viral clip released by the local TV broadcaster shows an army of little orange robots sorting out packages in a warehouse in eastern China, the latest example of how machines are increasingly taking over menial factory work in the world's most populous nation.
Via Disobedient Media
With everyone putting down new and/or revised "red lines", be it on Syria or North Korea, it was now China's turn to reveal its "red" or rather "bottom line", and in a harshly worded editorial titled "The United States Must Not Choose a Wrong Direction to Break the DPRK Nuclear Deadlock on Wednesday" Beijing warned it would attack North Korea's facilities producing nuclear bombs, effectively engaging in an act of war, if North Korea crosses China's "bottom line."
Overnight, Bloomberg has posted the latest article in a long-running series of warnings about the dangers of China's, now $9 trillion - and fast approaching 100% of GDP - shadow banking system, which it says is playing a "game of chicken with investors", and which boils down to the following: if there is a high profile failure of any one of the countless wealth management product, or WMPs, which comprise the vast majority of China's shadow banking system, and if the government does not bail it out - as it has threatened on several occasions to do - there may be a mass "run on the shadow ban