Friday 20 December 2013

Friday 20th

Only in China could a bank that defaulted for $1 billion in
June IPO in December and raise $3 billion
Everbright Bank slides in HK debut amid China cash crunch fears
{http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-everbright-listing-idUSBRE9BJ03P20131220}

Xinhua’s Top Ten Popular Words of 2013
{http://www.thechinastory.org/dossier/xinhuas-top-ten-popular-words-of-2013/}

China’s Stocks Extend Slump in Longest Losing Streak Since 1994
{http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-20/china-stock-index-futures-rise-after-pboc-adds-funds-to-lenders.html}

Abandon commodities!
{http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/12/abandon-commodities/}

Irrationality, trend-following, and cats
{http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/01/investing}

Who Owns Congress?
{http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/12/who-owns-congress-2/#more-112948}

How strong is gold’s “Wall of Worry?”
{http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-strong-is-golds-wall-of-worry-2013-12-18}

Thursday 19 December 2013

Thursday 19th December

good market revision
{http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=N8o-QIn12ak}

Wolf repeat in the Irish
Why Abenomics is bound to disappoint Japan
{http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/why-abenomics-is-bound-to-disappoint-japan-1.1631136?page=2}

Morning MoneyBeat Asia: Fed’s Sweet Taper May Give Asia a Toothache
{http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/12/18/morning-moneybeat-asia-feds-sweet-taper-may-give-asia-a-toothache/}

A Professional Preps for the End of QE
{http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuabrown/2013/05/12/a-professional-preps-for-the-end-of-qe/}
You may think of this as the end of QE but many of us, those with multi-decade time horizons and big dreams for the future, will instead be thinking of this as the beginning of something else. Just as T.S. Eliot would along with all the other bright-eyed opportunists throughout history. “The end is where we start from.”
The bottom line is that the current zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and the various quantitative easings will be dismantled and undone as slowly and deliberately as they were put on. We’ll not be thrown down face-first atop a wooden table, ravished and thrusted upon by coarse soldiers as a sentry guards the door. No, after all this time I believe that our corset shall be untied gingerly and with care, our hips caressed and our neck dappled with an archipelago of gentle kisses. Bernanke is nothing if not a patient lover, subtle almost to a fault.

Friday 13 December 2013

Friday 13th December


What Sir Isaac Newton can teach us about London’s ludicrous property price bubble
(and Tower Resources)
{http://moneyweek.com/merryns-blog/what-sir-isaac-newton-can-teach-us-about-londons-ludicrous-property-price-bubble/}
TRP LN



It shows what happened to poor Isaac Newton in the South Sea bubble. He bought in early and sold out when things look ridiculously expensive . Then, as prices rose and rose and rose he lost confidence in his judgement and bought back in. That was fine for a very short period. Then came the crash. Prices fell back way below the level at which he had bought. Then the level at which he had first sold. And then the level at which he had first bought.
Newton went on to repurchase a good deal more South Sea Company shares at more than three times the price of his original stake, and then proceeded to lose £20,000 (which, in 1720, amounted to almost all his life savings). This prompted him to add, allegedly, that
“I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”

Thursday 12 December 2013

Thursday 12th

Chinese shop owners in Argentina arm themselves with guns amid violent looting
{http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1378897/chinese-shop-owners-argentina-arm-themselves-guns-amid-violent}
since more than 80 per cent of the country's supermarkets are estimated to be owned by the Chinese, the community has suffered considerable financial loss in the looting.

Everything you need to know about the Volcker Rule
{http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/dec/11/volcker-rule-explained-banking-regulation}

MORGAN STANLEY: Stop Talking About Tapering — Here's What You Should Be Talking About Instea
{http://www.businessinsider.com/morgan-stanley-stop-talking-about-tapering-2013-12}

Friday 6 December 2013

Friday the 6th

What Exactly Is Economic Growth?

A LIST OF REASONS WHY OUR BRAINS LOVE LISTS
{http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/a-list-of-reasons-that-our-brains-love-lists.html}

1. Our brains love lists
2. The headline catches our eye in a stream of content
3. It positions its subject within a preëxisting category and classification syste
4. It spatially organizes the information and it promises a story that’s finite whose length has been quantified upfront.
5. They create an easy reading experience, in which the mental heavy lifting of conceptualization, categorization, and analysis is completed well in advance of actual consumption.
6. They often hit our attentional sweet spot
7. Alleviate the so-called “paradox of choice”—the phenomenon that the more information and options we have, the worse we feel.
8. we process it more efficiently, and we retain it with little effort. Faced with a detailed discussion of policies toward China or five insane buildings under construction in Shanghai, we tend to choose the latter bite-sized option.

Even when we know we will not be entirely satisfied by it, That’s just fine, as long as we realize that our fast-food information diet is necessarily limited in content and nuance, and thus unlikely to contain the nutritional value of the more in-depth analysis of traditional articles that rely on paragraphs, not bullet points."