Shanghai

One week ago we showed the disturbing degree to which the latest (and greatest) housing bubble among China's Tier 1 has gripped the broader public, when we reported that local speculators are waiting in line for days to flip homes. 

Visually, it looks as follows - the bubble is entirely in the Tier 1 cities; for now everyone has given up on the other regions which are suffering greatly as a result of the bursting of the commodity bubble and have seen an exodus of recently unemployed workers:

Via PandaHedge.com,

The price of home price in China’s tier one cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) started another around of rally in the last couple months, and became “crazy” in Feb as described by the Chinese who form lines to buy the apartments everywhere.

When I saw this online commercial as below, I cannot help asking myself: Really?  This place can be sold as a “home” (I thought it’s just a kitchen), and at this price ($9k per sqf)?

Following USD strength last week, China has come back to work after the disappointment of the Shanghai non-accord and weakened the Yuan fix by 0.2% - the most since January 7th.

This move follows pressure from offshore Yuan weakness since traders returned from Golden Week - driving the onshore-offshore spread out to its widest since The PBOC stepped in and stomped the shorts.

Whether this week's market surge was catalyzed by two consecutive "technical problems" in the bond market, first the unexpected failure of the Fed's MBS POMO on Wednesday and then the 7 Year Treasury auction's last minute cancellations yesterday, and quite clearly it was...

... is irrelevant as the short squeeze has not only returned with a vengeance...

... but the critical 1,950 resistance and 50 DMA in the S&P500 was taken out...

After a burst of volatility in the developed market over the past month, one odd outlier was China, where after a surge of gut-wrenching moves in both its currency and equity markets (recall that it was China's troubles with marketwide circuit breakers at the start of January that may have catalyzed the global volatility wave), Chinese stocks remained relatively quiet and resilient, levitating quietly day after day. That all changed overnight when the Shanghai Composite plunged by 6.4% with the drop accelerating into the close.