China

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

 

“Housing in Vancouver is insane — it was insane when I left and it’s more insane now.”

That’s from 33-year-old Kevin Oke, co-founder of LlamaZoo Interactive who left Vancouver for Victoria two years ago because he couldn’t afford to buy a home in his native city even while earning a generous salary as a lead designer at a video-game company whose clients included Atari and Ubisoft Entertainment SA.  

Submitted by Charles Huigh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Cheap imports, offshoring of production and the global expansion of financial markets have driven U.S. corporate and financial profits to unprecedented heights.

On the heels of China’s move to devalue the yuan on August 11, the market’s attention abruptly shifted to something we’d been discussing for quite some time. Namely, China’s rapidly depleting FX reserves.

To sum up: China car sales crash by most on record (boom goes the overseas growth meme), US existing home sales plunge most in 6 years (boom goes the domestic housing strength supporting consumption meme), Williams and Lockhart go full hawk-tard (positing April as "live" and suggesting everything is hawkishly awesome), and one of our most succeesful 'innovative' tech firms unveils the worst product launch ever... and investors buy stocks with both hands and feet...