Yuan

As the crackdown against Zexi was taking place, Shanghai police also arrested 3 suspects as they cracked a case of stock futures price manipulation involving over 11.3 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion), police said yesterday in a statement. According to Shanghai Daily, Yishidun, a commercial company registered in Jiangsu Province’s Zhangjiagang City in 2012, was found to use an illegal stock futures trading software to destabilize the market and profit from volatility.

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On a day full of Manufacturing/PMI surveys from around the globe, the numbers everyone was looking at came out of China, where first the official, NBS PMI data disappointed after missing Mfg PMI expectations (3rd month in a row of contraction), with the Non-mfg PMI sliding to the lowest since 2008, however this was promptly "corrected" after the other Caixin manufacturing PMI soared to 48.3 in October from 47.2 in September - the biggest monthly rise of 2015 - and far better than the median estimate of 47.6, once again leading to the usual questions about China's Schrodinger economy, first defined here, which is continues to expand and contract at the same time.

Ironically, it would only exacerbate the pressure and you can handsomely profit from it

Ok, this is China: crazy things happen all the time. But where things got outright ridiculous, was when moments ago when as China National Radio reports, Wu Shuang, a partner of Xu Xiang's at Zexi, and also an insider trading suspect, was shot and killed by Chinese police when he "resisted and tried to escape."

As per the fixing limits established as part of the August 11 Yuan devaluation, moments ago the PBOC announced that it had set the Yuan at a USDCNY fixing of 6.3154, a strengthening of a massive 0.54% - the most since 2005 - following the manic end of trading PBOC intervention on Friday that sent the Yuan soaring some 300 pips from 6.3475 to 6.3175.

Confusion reigns... China's Manufacturing PMI is in contraction according to both the Official and Markit/Caixin measures (but the former was flat and missed while the latter rose and beat "confirming economic stability" according to the 'official' press). Following the largest strengthening fix for the Yuan in 10 years, both the onshore and offshore Yuan are weakening by the most since the August devaluation. Finally, having cliff-dived at the open, Chinese stocks have bounced back to unchanged on the Ciaxin PMI beat (but US equities drift lower still).

The most anticipated economic release over the weekend was the early glimpse into China's manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors via the two key PMI surveys released by China's National Bureau of Statistics, to get a sense if the slowdown across China is stabilizing or, as some have suggested, rebounding. It did not: overnight the NBS reported that the manufacturing PMI remained unchanged in October at 49.8 missing consensus estimates of a modest rebound to 50.0, its third consecutive month in contraction territory.

China as the global Bubble’s focal point – the weak link yet, at the same time, the key marginal source of Bubble finance. China’s policy course appears to focus on two facets: to stabilize the yuan versus the dollar and to resuscitate Credit expansion. For better than two decades, similar policy courses were followed by myriad EM policymakers in hopes of sustaining financial and economic booms. Many cases ended in abject failure – often spectacularly. Why? Because when officials resort to such measures to sustain faltering Bubbles it generally works to only exacerbate systemic fragilities. For one, late-stage reflationary measures compound Credit system vulnerability while compounding structural impairment to the real economy. Secondly, central bank and banking system Credit-bolstering measures create liquidity that invariably feeds destabilizing “capital” and “hot money” outflows.

• World stocks on course for best month in four years (Reuters)
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As Beijing fights to keep "Mr. Chen" and his "yellow loafers," tea, and Snickers bars from smuggling billions out of the country on behalf of Chinese citizens fearing an economic implosion and a double-digit deval, capital account convertibility may counterintuitively be one of the PBoC's most effective weapons as loosening capital controls will both calm the panicked masses and support the IMF SDR bit. Still, as Citi's David Lubin puts it, "China should expect to see gross capital outflows for the foreseeable future [and] it's not even clear that SDR inclusion will lead to a net capital inflow to China." 

In late 2014 something happened: for whatever reason the most unregulated aspect of China's financial system, its shadow banks, not only stopped lending money but actually went into reverse, thus putting a lid on China's Total Social Financing expansion, which had been the world's "under the radar" growth dynamo for so many years. At that moment not only did China's ghost cities officially die, but it meant an imminent collapse for China's steel industry. That collapse has arrived.

As all eyes, ears, and noses anxiously await the scantest of dovishness from Kuroda and The BoJ tonight (despite numerous hints that they will not unleash moar for now), the data that was just delivered may have helped the bad-news-is-good-news case. Most notably Japanese household spending dropped 0.4% YoY (with tax hike issues out of the way) missing expectations by a mile as the 'deflationary' mindset remains mired in Japanese heads. AsiaPac stocks are hovering at the week's lows unable to mount any bid as China fixed the Yuan notably stronger and instigated a new central pricing plan for pork prices (which suggests concerns about inflation domestically). Once again Chinese margin debt reaches a new 8-week high as 'stability' has prompted releveraging among the farmers and grandmas.

For the past few weeks we have been detailing the tightening of China capital controls and what that may mean for Bitcoin (most recently here). It appears the outflows (that offshore Yuan weakness relative to onshore Yuan suggests) are accelerating as Bitcoin just traded above $314 (up from around $200 when we first warned about China) - near the highest since December 2014.

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