Yuan

Looks like a loop bad US news, good EUR; good EUR must be good news.

Love boat, everywhere. Final Risk On, or so. And up 1%

Ah, hmm, yes, Greece… Not much else to chew on.

Risk is lofty and near the point where all stimulus measures that were already priced have been delivered.

So, what's next?

The last time we looked at monthly Chinese imports of gold from Hong Kong in 2012, the comparable country in question was Portugal (whose citizens, if not central bank, incidentally have run out of gold to sell), because that is whose total gold holdings (at 382.5 tons) Chinese imports had just surpassed. Fast forward a month later, and the update is even more disturbing. In July, Chinese gold imports from HK, after two months of declines, have picked up once more and hit a 3-month high of 75.8 tons. While it is notable that this number is double the 38.1 tons imported a year prior, and that year-to-date imports are now a record 458.6 tons, well over four times greater than the seven month total in 2011 which was 103.9 tons, what is far more important is that in the first seven months of 2012 alone China has imported nearly as much gold as the total holdings of the hedge fund at the heart of the Eurozone, elsewhere known simply as the European Central Bank, and just as importantly considering the import run-rate has hardly slowed down in August, which data we will have in a few weeks, it is now safe to say that in 2012 alone China has imported more gold than the ECB's entire official 502.1 tons of holdings.

The disregard for the future and the fundamentals of fiscal well-being is about to reap consequences. The Powers That Be counted on "time healing all," as if the mere passage of time would magically heal a broken economy and political machine. Time heals all--unless you have an aggressive cancer. The system has been pushed to extremes: the expectations are impossibly high, the promises are impossibly generous and the sums of money demanded by the vested interests "just to stay afloat" are stratospheric. The "run to fail" levers have all been pushed to the maximum, and it is simply too politically painful to make any real-world adjustments that might save the system from imploding. Nobody wants a crisis, yet a crisis is the only thing that can save the system from implosion.

Those who think that China's centrally-planned transition to the world's leading, fastest growing economy in the shortest time in world history, coupled with its attempt to shift from a mercantilist, export-driven economy, to one sporting the world's largest middle class is progressing smoothly and according to plan, especially as related to millions of overeducated young adults who are finding it impossible to find a job in China's big cities, and find their diplomas uselss in the small ones, are urged to watch the following documentary exposing "China's Broken Dreams." From Al Jazeera: "[The Chinese] people are discovering that society's resources and opportunities are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. People in the middle and lower strata of society are becoming increasingly marginalised and are finding that improving their lives is getting harder. [This imbalance could lead to] the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, the strong permanently strong and the weak permanently weak .... The biggest harm may not be in the gap between rich and poor itself, but the deterioration of the overall societal ecosystem." Translation: class war unlike anything seen even in America, where class war is the basis for the entire presidential campaign. Because unlike the US, "class war" in China will have a far more true to its name outcome.

Today the Chinese stock market did something unthinkable: it plunged to fresh post 2009 lows on news so bad they would have been enough to send the stock markets of such "developed" bizarro economies as the US and Europe limit up. The catalyst, as Bloomberg reports, was that Chinese industrial companies’ profits fell in July by the most this year, a government report showed today, adding to evidence the nation’s economic slowdown is deepening. Income dropped 5.4 percent last month from a year earlier to 366.8 billion yuan ($57.7 billion), the fourth straight decline, National Bureau of Statistics data today showed. That compares with a 1.7 percent slide in June and a 5.3 percent drop in May. What is disturbing is that the slide persisted even as revenue in the first seven months increased 10.6 percent to 50 trillion yuan, today’s report showed. Which means that cost and wage pressures are starting to truly bite Chinese corporations, that the US ability to export inflation to China is much more limited, and that one can forget the PBOC easing monetary conditions any time soon for many of the reasons discussed in the past week. It also means that China is now stuck hoping that Wen Jiabao will at least implement some fiscal stimulus. The reality however, judging by the SHCOMP's reaction, is that the benefit from fiscal programs in China, and everywhere else, is far more limited than monetary policy intervention. End result: SHCOMP down 1.74%,to 2,055, a three year low.

China has two problems... well more than two we are sure, but these seem critical. The combination of a slowing (and seemingly unstoppable) economic trajectory with significant negative money-flows is becoming a vicious circle - that the PBOC is increasingly unable (or politically incapable) to 'fix'.

"Houston, we have a problem"

All major macro data from China over the last 2 days have been disappointing. The third quarter started on a surprisingly weak note for China despite all the talks (and hope) on stimulus and monetary policy easing. The macro data pretty much confirm our view that economic growth did not reach a bottom in the second quarter as the consensus used to believe. If anything, the economy seems to be worsening somewhat again. We hope that the consensus is (finally) right and that we are wrong. We hope that we will not be repeating the joke that “the consensus is expecting a recovery in next quarter during every quarter”. Unfortunately, we just don’t see that, and we doubt if the government has the willingness at this point to do much more, and we doubt whether the government really has the ability as the market thinks. We do not see convincing signs of recovery (except, perhaps, Wen Jiabao making waves every other week), and we even struggle to see signs of stabilisation. If we see anything, we are seeing a bottomless pit.

As reported on Wednesday night, China's economy is contracting faster than anyone expected. As further reported last night, China loan creation at 540.1 billion yuan was far below economist estimates of 700 billion. In other words: the world's marginal economy is starting to crack. So the PBOC has no choice but to ease right? Wrong. As we showed yesterday, the Chinese central bank has one mandate above all: food price stability, or else suffer the consequences of "1+ billion people instability." And as the USDA report just confirmed, Soybean is going nowhere but up. Which in turn means Chinese food inflation, which makes up 30% of the headline CPI (unlike America's 7.8%) is set to follow. Still hoping and praying that the PBOC will ease even as the deep fried black swan we warned about 2 weeks ago is rapidly flapping its wings toward Beijing? Hope and pray harder.

The Financial Times published an interesting article on Wednesday by a Tokyo-based analyst with Arcus Research, Peter Tasker, entitled of 'Cash out of gold and send kids to college'. The article is interesting as it is an articulate synopsis of those who are either negative on and or bearish on gold. It clearly shows the continuing failure to understand the importance of gold as a diversification and as financial insurance. Tasker incorrectly states that gold is "just another financial asset, as vulnerable to the shifts of investor sentiment as an emerging market." He conveniently ignores over 2,000 years of history showing how gold is a store of value. He also ignores recent academic research showing gold to be a hedging instrument and a safe haven asset. Another fact unacknowledged is how gold has clearly been a store of value since the current financial and economic crisis began in 2007. Since then gold has protected people from depreciating financial assets (such as equities and noncore bonds) and from depreciating fiat currencies such as the dollar, the pound and more recently the euro. 

While all eyes are on the absurdist tragicomedy playing out in Europe, Japan is quietly circling a financial black hole as its export economy is destroyed by its strong currency and the global recession. There is a terrible irony in export-dependent nations being viewed as "safe havens." Their safe haven status pushes their currencies higher, which then crushes their export sector, which then weakens their entire economy and stability, undermining the very factors that created their safe haven status.

While it would appear that all news is good news; good news (or no news) is better news; and old-news is the best news; here is your one stop summary of all the notable bullish and bearish events in the past seven days.

Did you know that Chinese government officials are all corrupt? Did you know that many of Chinese statistics look either weird or totally unreliable to a point that even the Vice Premier can’t help admitting it? People outside of China have never really trusted the Chinese Communist Party as far as politics are concerned, and probably never will. However, the seemingly unstoppable growth engine of China has produced a remarkable level of complacency among investors that China is going to do well. While recent economic data from China are mixed at best, the market consensus is unanimously biased towards believing that the second quarter is the bottom. We do not understand the reasons behind the faith in the Chinese leadership as far as running the economy is concerned.  Here are a few reasons why you should just stop believing in the Chinese leadership when it comes to running the economy.