China

In the most blatant and open admission of direct manipulation, China's Vice President Li told a room full of Davosian elites that China is willing to keep intervening in the stock market to make sure that a few speculators don’t benefit at the expense of regular investors. Following last night's largest liquidty injection in over 3 years (and subsequent plunge in Chinese stocks), it appears the Chinese economic/market "bucket" has more holes than the intervention 'hose pipe' can handle.

Things are looking increasingly shaky for central planners around the globe.

Two months ago, long before the WSJ and the NYT wrote nearly identical pieces, we laid out a list of China risk factors which everyone by now is familiar with. These were as follows:

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The robo-machines are now having a grand old time hazing the August lows at 1870 on the S&P, and may succeed in ginning up another dead-cat bounce or two. But this market is going down for the count owing to a perfect storm.

Traders who may have napped through the earlier oil slide below $28 finally woke up just in time for the China open to find that while there was little excitement on the currency front following a Yuan fixing, which at 6.5578 was practially unchanged from yesterday's midpoint of 6.5596...

...the Shanghai composite - following yesterday's torrid, manipulated last hour surge - opened 0.5% lower, sliding back below the 3,000 level which was breached last week for the first time since last summer.