China

"Growth" meet "mal-investment boom-bust" In a perfect example of the smoke-and-mirror-ness of China's credit-fueled expansion, a 27-storey high-rise building which was completed on November 15th 2015 was just demolished, "having been left unused for too long."

As China People's Daily reports,

Directional blasting demolition of a high-rise building was completed successfully at 7 a.m. on November 15, 2015 in Xi'an, in northwestern China's Shaanxi province.

 

 

A huge fire has broken out after a chemical plant exploded in the city of Lengshuijiang, in China’s South Eastern Hunan province, according to local media reports. 突发：【湖南冷水江一化工厂爆炸起火 现场震感强烈】据湖南娄底市广播电视台公众号消息，今晚8：30左右，冷水江一化工厂突然爆炸起火，附近市民均感觉到强烈的震感，爆炸原因尚未明确。 pic.twitter.com/KEtSssf4XU — 黄昭雲 (@huangzhaoyun) January 9, 2016 Emergency crews are on the scene of the blast, which comes only weeks after two huge industrial explosions in the country killed dozens of people It is not  yet clear if anyone was injured or killed and the cause of the blast is still unknown.

It may be Saturday, but there is no rest for the onslaught of negative data from China, which overnight reported the latest, December, consumer and producer price inflation numbers, with the former printing at 1.6% Y/Y, matching consensus estimates, and a tiny increase from the 1.5% in November: the rebound was largely due to one-time items. For all of 2015, CPI rose 1.4%, the slowest annual increase since 2009 and well below Beijing's goal of keeping last year's inflation below 3%. In 2014, CPI rose 2.0%.

By EconMatters

Earlier today, CNBC invited Kyle Bass, the man who correctly predicted and profited from the subprime collapse, to discuss what he thought was the biggest threat to the global financial system.

http://player.cnbc.com/p/gZWlPC/cnbc_global

Here is the highlight of what he said: