China

China-based digital currency exchanges have until the end of September to cease operations after Chinese authorities, spooked by the ICO craze, decided earlier this month to crack down on all exchange-based digital currency trading.

Trading volume in China has fallen dramatically since the country’s exchanges briefly halted withdrawals earlier this year as they implemented new AML controls. Now, it appears that at least some of those displaced by China’s crackdown have migrated to South Korea, which today overtook China as the third-largest market for bitcoin trading by volume.

The hype surrounding the credit-fueled resurgence in base metals in the first half of 2017 has crashed and burned on the altar of reality in China's slowdown with industrial metals from copper to iron ore and zinc all plunging in the last two weeks. Odd that we don't hear much from mainstream business media discussing the implications for a global coordinated economic growth narrative...

Since the start of September, industrial metals have been hammered (as stocks soared)...

Iron Ore prices have crashed into a bear market...

Four months after Moody's downgraded China to A1 from Aa3, unwittingly launching a startling surge in the Yuan as Beijing set forth to "prove" just how "stable" China truly is through its nationalized capital markets, moments ago S&P followed suit when the rating agency also downgraded China from AA- to A+ for the first time since 1999 citing risks from soaring debt growth, less than a month before the most important congress for Chiina's communist leadership in the past five years is set to take place.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Last week US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin warned the US will impose new sanctions on China if it doesn't conform to UN sanctions on North Korea:

"If China doesn’t follow these sanctions, we will put additional sanctions on them and prevent them from accessing the U.S. and international dollar system, and that’s quite meaningful."

The past two weeks have been quite a rollercoaster for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In loose chronological order, we have seen: