China

Authored by Harry Kazianis via The Stratgeic Culture Foundation,

In his recent book The Improbable War, professor Christopher Coker explains that it is “of vital importance that the possibility of a conflict between China and the United States continues to be discussed.” Coker’s rationale for this is simple: “If the United States and China continue to convince themselves that war is too ‘improbable’ to take seriously, it is not they but the rest of the world that may ultimately pay the price.”

While most traders over the past month have been obsessing over developments in Washington, the real action - most of it under the radar - has played out in China, where as discussed over the past few weeks, domestic liquidity has tightened notably, culminating with an unexpected bailout by the PBOC of various smaller banks who defaulted on their interbank loans as interest rates, particularly on Certificates of Deposit (CD) - which have become a preferred funding conduit for many Chinese banks - but not only, spiked.

In China's latest effort to control capital flight, authorities have banned Chinese citizens from buying property in Hong Kong using their credit cards.The use of Chinese credit cards to pay for a portion of property transactions is widespread in Hong Kong.

Authored by George Friedman via MauldinEconomics.com,

As we wrote about in “China’s Strategy,” East Asia is split into four parts: The Pacific archipelago, the Chinese mainland, the Korean Peninsula, and Indochina. East Asia holds the second and third largest world economies: China and Japan. The relationship between them and the US define modern East Asian geopolitics.

On Friday, we summarized research reports from Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, which came to the same conclusion: the fate of the global economic rebound may be in the hands of the Chinese housing bubble, which through price appreciation has unleashed wealth effect equivalent to twice the annual disposable income of China.