China

All day Saturday, South Korea braced for a possible new missile test by North Korea as the provocative northern neighbor marked its founding anniversary, just days after its sixth and largest nuclear test rattled global financial markets and further escalated tensions in the region. Throughout the week, South Korean officials warned the North could launch another intercontinental ballistic missile, in defiance of U.N. sanctions and to further provoke the US. As Reuters reports, Pyongyang marks its founding anniversary each year with a big display of pageantry and military hardware.

One day after Bitcoin crashed on a massive surge in volume, following a report in China's Caixin website that Chinese authorities plan to shut local Bitcoin exchanges....

... there is still far more confusion than clarity about what is really going on in China: so far there has been no official statement from either the PBOC or China's financial regulator, confirming or denying the report, which spooked millions of Chinese bitcoin (and ethereum and litecoin) holders into dumping their digital currencies. As a reminder, this is the gist of the Caixin report:

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

In his latest Email article, Steen Jakobsen, Saxo Bank Chief economist and CIO has a bold prediction about interest rates.

With nearly everyone, even Janet Yellen at the Fed, predicting wage-induced inflation, Jakobsen makes a bold call in the opposite direction.

This is a guest post by Steen Jakobsen

Steen’s Chronicle: All Great Things are Simple, Except Right Now

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,

Trading is difficult. If anyone tells you differently, they are either new (and haven’t been hurt yet), or just plain stupid. You are competing in the greatest game out there, against some of the smartest people on the planet.

Even when you do your analysis and get the call right, it is no guarantee you will make money. The Market Gods have a way of making sure that being right is way easier than stuffing dough in your pocket.

European stocks dropped, Asian and EM market rose, and S&P were lower by 0.3% as investors assessed the latest overnight carnage in the USD which plunged to the lowest level since the start of 2015, sending the USDJPY tumbling to 107, the euro extending gains to just shy of $1.21 and a slowdown in China’s export growth which however did not prevent the Yuan from posting its best weekly gain on record.