China

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The American guided missile destroyer USS Dewey was reported as having carried out a ‘freedom of navigation operation’ or FONOP in the South China Sea on May 24. According to the US Naval Institute the undertaking involved manoeuvres «within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef for about 90 minutes zig-zagging in the water near the installation. At one point during the operation, the ship’s crew conducted a man overboard drill».

Following yesterday's official  (if less credible and focused mostly on SOEs) manufacturing and non-mfg PMI reports from China's National Bureau of Statistics, both of which came either in line or slightly better than expected, moments ago Caixin/Markit reported its own set of Chinese manufacturing data, and it was far more disappointing: at 49.6, not only did it miss expectations of 50.1, but by printing below 50, the operating conditions faced by Chinese goods producers deteriorated for the first time in nearly a year.

As part of its periodic Global Economic Outlook, SocGen traditionally includes a discussion of what it views are the biggest "black swans" both to the upside and the downside, and the latest just released edition titled "On a Plateau", which took a rather grim outlook to the world economy predicting that a US recession will likely hit in the not too distant future while "China, South Korea, Australia, US, Germany, UK and Japan are in the more mature phase of the cycle", and that current global growth is "essentially as good as it gets"...

... was no different. 

Less than a week after Moody's downgraded China's sovereign credit rating, prompting an unprecedented currency response by the PBOC which as noted earlier resumed its crusade against Yuan shorts by sending CNH overnight deposit rates as high as 65%, on Wednesday another rating agency, Fitch, took aim at what many consider the weakest link in China's financial system: the nearly $9 trillion in shadow banking "assets", of which roughly $4 billion are Wealth Management Products.

It has been another quiet session for global equity markets, with S&P futures flat, as are European and Asian stocks, which is perhaps odd, as there was quite a bit of newsflow and, in the case of China, outright fireworks.