China

In early November, we discussed how commentators were disturbed by the sell-off in Chinese government bonds after the Party Congress, which saw yields rise to 4.0%. The anomaly was that yields in less-liquid, unsecured Chinese corporate bonds had barely moved. Some sleuthing on the part of the Wall Street Journal discovered that the most likely explanation was that redemptions in China’s shadow banking sector, especially in the infamous $4 trillion Wealth Management Products (WMP), meant that cash needed to be raised…quickly. Highly liquid government bonds were the easiest option.

We present some somber reading on this holiday Sunday from Macquarie Capital’s Viktor Shvets, who in this exclusive to ZH readers excerpt from his year-ahead preview, explains why central banks can no longer exit the “doomsday highway” as a result of a “dilemma from hell” which no longer has a practical, real-world resolution, entirely as a result of previous actions by the same central bankers who are now left with no way out from a trap they themselves have created.

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Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

A former Clinton Foundation official who is now an independent director at a firm which operates private schools in China has found himself embroiled in a bizarre child abuse scandal involving needles, pills, “brown syrup,” nudity, and sexual molestation, according to parents.

Authord by Alastair Crooke via The Automatic Earth blog,

Robert Kagan first called attention to the fact that America would need to awake from its ‘dream’ a decade ago in End of Dreams: The Return of History, and would have to manage the rise of ‘other’ powers, (some greater than others), with adroitness, if it were to avoid a bad road-crash as emerging competitors clashed with the waning dominant power.  

Have you heard the one about the priest, the rabbi and China's deleveraging? We forget how it goes, but it's pretty damn funny, especially the last part after a Reuters report that following China's repeated vows by Beijing it would reduce the country's unprecedented sovereign, municipal, corporate and household leverage, China's debt is not only rising, but growing at the fastest pace in four years.