Among the bigger financial problems covered in depth on Zero Hedge over the past several years, have been China's massive amount of newly created credit adding to an already unsustaimable debt load (estimated as high as 350%), its rapidly growing bad debt pile (what we call China's "neutron bomb" which as we first estimated last October is about 20% of total bank debt), and its sub-prime real estate bubble.
It appears Russia is close to taking the next big step towards de-dollarization and killing the petro-dollar as Vladimir Putin's "dream" of ruble-based pricing of its domestically-produced oil is on the verge of realization. SPIMEX (The St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange) is actively courting international oil traders to join its emerging futures market, which as Bloomberg reports, is designed "to create a system where Russian oil is priced and traded in a fair and straightforward way."
Researchers in China have discovered the world’s longest insect. A two-foot-long stick insect was found wriggling on a mountain road in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2014 , according to state media. Xinhua reports: Zhao Li, with the Insect Museum of West China (IMWC) in Chengdu, found the 62.4-cm-long stick insect during a field inspection in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2014, breaking the record for length for all 807,625 insects discovered so far, according to the IMWC. The previous record holder was a stick insect found in Malaysia in 2008.
My latest column at The Week begins thusly:
With his last two opponents, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, out of the race, Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee for president of the Republican Party. As Kublai Khan conquered the ancient Song Empire of China to become its first barbarian emperor, Trump swooped down and conquered the once-mighty party of Lincoln. Now that party has to figure out how to respond.
Somnolent Europe, Russia, and China
Can the world wake up?
Paul Craig Roberts
On September 19, 2000, going on 16 years ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph reported:
“Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.