It will just buy it, piece by piece. Read more »
China
…is a thing people, knowing his position on the country, have probably asked Jim Rogers before. And don’t think he hasn’t thought of it! Unfortunately, the investor is spoken for. Having said that, Rogers is thrilled at the prospect of his daughters’, ages 4 and 9 years-old, marrying one of China’s native sons and is currently accepting applications from potential suitors. Read more »
I guess it’s time for me to stop being amused when China does not-especially-Communist things, but still, I giggled a bit when I saw that China is liberalizing its short-selling rules at around the time that Western Europe is tightening its rules. Because freedom on the march, or whatever, though as David Keohane at FT Alphaville points out, China’s short-selling thingie is pretty solidly in the state-sponsored capitalism camp.
It’s not entirely clear to me why China is liberalizing its rules; the answer seems to be “so that financial institutions can make more money charging hedge funds for stock borrow,” which I guess. Another possible answer could be loosely of the form “China is tired of Americans and Australians making all the money shorting Chinese fraud companies and wants domestic investors to get a crack at that action.” More generally, if you have capital markets beset with fraud, you want to provide incentives to catch that fraud. And if you’re looking to get foreign capital and are worried about embarrassing incidents, it’s nice to have at least some of those incidents taken care of within the family – by Chinese speculators catching Chinese frauds – rather than being exposed to the wider world.
Of course the same incentives exist in Europe, where companies with pretty opaque balance sheets bounce around not telling you whether their balance sheets are filled with fake trees, in the form of Greek bonds, or real trees, in the form of, I don’t know, Swiss francs. Which is why lots of people aren’t that keen on short selling bans on financial stocks in Europe. And yet European regulators seem to disagree. Let’s strain ourselves to justify that a bit shall we?
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TG is calling for a little teamwork. Read more »
Apparently they’ve been together for years? And say I love you though only because they have to? And are basically just fuck buddies but still apparently care enough to get upset and over-analyze the relationship to their friends? And sometimes China dresses up in leather and uses its 7 piece bondage kit on us? Read more »
It’s by now a familiar story of the financial crisis: German and Icelandic bankers keep finding themselves the owners of mortgages on grandmothers’ houses in Kansas, and it’s hard to decide which side is more befuddled by it. The Federal Reserve yesterday went one step further up the value chain, publishing an interesting discussion paper called “ABS Inflows to the United States and the Global Financial Crisis” and adding some data and nuance to the story of how we got to a world where a banker flapping his arms in Saxony causes a foreclosure in Topeka.
The Fed researchers started out from a popular explanation of the financial crisis, that a “global savings glut” in certain countries (above all China but also other emerging markets, the OPEC countries etc.) inflated an asset bubble in the US as foreign savers searched for safe but yieldy investments. The puzzle with that theory, though, is that the Chinese didn’t really buy subprime ABS. They bought – and still buy – Treasuries, which worked out well for them. Europeans bought the shit:
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China, the largest foreign holder of United States debt, said Saturday that Washington needed to “cure its addiction to debts” and “live within its means,” just hours after the rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s long-term debt…“The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone,” read the commentary, which was published in Chinese newspapers. [NYT]
“Senior Chinese officials are appalled by the impasse among U.S. politicians on raising the nation’s debt ceiling to avoid a default,” said Stephen Roach, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. “Coming so shortly on the heels of the subprime crisis, the debate over the debt ceiling and the budget deficit is the last straw for China.” [Bloomberg]
We’re sick of the debt ceiling too but just hear this out.
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Related, the Rogers grandchildren may or may not want to request grandpa’s coin collection, rather than what he’s earmarked for them, should their opinions of China be more in line with those of Jim Chanos. Read more »
A delegation of more than 20 hedge fund operators, government officials and representatives of business organizations spent much of Monday visiting area firms and at a reception at the Stamford branch of the University of Connecticut, discussing their desire to establish a hedge fund community in FengXian, one of 18 districts that comprise Shanghai. Greenwich could be the example that the Chinese want to emulate, according to Zhang Xiaosong, a member of the Standing Committee and vice magistrate of the Shanghai FengXian Committee of the CPC People’s Government of FengXian District Shanghai. “Shanghai wants to be an international city and a center for hedge funds,” he told an audience at the reception. “We want to know how to create a good environment to attract the financial industry.” [Advocate via Daily Intel]
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