By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
After Pedro and his tortilla munching amigos south of the US border, Trump's favourite punching bag appears to be China:
I questioned the wisdom of this in last week's World Out of Whack.
Contrary to Trump's claims, China is trying to fight a market which is pressuring the yuan down. We know that China isn't actively pressuring their currency down but rather trying to hold back the outflows.
As China got back to work after Golden Week, it appeared a renewed exuberance appeared in every orifice of liquidity provision (even as PBOC sucked up excess for 6 straight days). Stocks are up, bonds are up, and commodities are soaring (all as Yuan tumbles) and tonight authorities unleashed 100bn reverse-repo (for the first time in 7 days) as leverage seems nothing to worry about again yields drop and asset prices rise.
The United States is concerned about the possibility of China making contact with extraterrestrials, according to the SETI Institute. John Hertz, former chairman of the board of trustees for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) told the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society that sending signals to alien civilizations was “extremely dangerous.” The warning comes after Chinese scientists announced that they were actively seeking to make contact with aliens in outer space.
One year ago, when we first started discussing the Vancouver housing bubble, which as we first speculated - and was later confirmed - was the result of Chinese oligarch money-launderers parking "hot cash" in this offshore housing market (at least until a 15% property tax on foreign purchases made Seattle the new Vancouver), we said that Vancouver houses had become the de facto new Swiss bank account, and because of that the houses - once purchased - would remain a highly overprized, if vacant tribute to China's soaring capital outflows.
Trump met with Shinzo Abe friday, the famous inflationist Prime Minister of Japan. The issue in question is if Trump will label Japan a 'currency manipulator' - whatever that means. It seems to be the equivalent of 'Currency Headwinds' in publicly traded companies. Because, every currency is manipulated! The only currency in use today that's not manipulated, is Bitcoin and the Bitcoin alternatives (Author's note: Bitcoin is actually really useful, try it here). From Bloomberg: