China's plunge protection team may be scrambling to prop up the Shanghai Composite for the duration of the People's Congress, but the moment the NPC is over, the stock "market" goes with it, and the people know it. But now that China has its favorite bubble back - housing - few care: after all the stock bubble was meant purely as a placeholder until houseflipping mania returns.
As has been widely trumpeted across the financial media, today was the 7 year anniversary of the March 2009 market bottom: whether this "most hated rally" was worth the $60+ trillion in incremental global debt and the $14 trillion in global central bank liquidity, even as the middle class has been decimated - as we forecast would happen roughly around the time Ben Bernanke unveiled QE1- leading to such outcomes as a global rejection of a failed status quo and the rise of Donald Trump we leave to the historians.
As the world came to depend increasingly on China for growth in the wake of the financial crisis, scrutiny around the economic numbers emanating from Beijing began to build.
The Chinese government is developing Orwellian surveillance technology to predict crimes or terrorist attacks before they take place by tapping into the thoughts of its citizens. The Big Brother technology is known as ‘Predictive policing’ and was actually born in the United States, but China is poised to emerge as a leader in the field.
After yesterday's last hour selloff sent the S&P to the very edge of the critical support trendline which, as shown yesterday, meant 1980 had to be defended at all costs...
... so far the support has held, and in overnight trading European stocks have managed to rebound on the back of more levitation in oil, while US equity futures have ignored a drop in the USDJPY which touched 112.20 in morning trading, and have jumped by 0.5% as of this moment, up 10 points to 1,990.