Tag Archives: Chinese government

From the Notebook: Evergrande and How About that Dollar Bear Market . . . by Tom Luongo

It appears that Xi Jingping is well aware of American and British color revolution and regime change efforts and is determined to avoid that in China. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

From the Notebook posts are reworks of articles originally published for my Patrons. This one was first published on September 7th.

While it’s becoming easier to see how the various projects supporting the Great Reset are progressing just by reading the headlines and seeing how things are spun to manufacture consent, sometimes a story is deeper than the headlines.

I’ve watched the situation surrounding Evergrande’s collapse in China unfold like everyone else in this space.  Like many of you, and hat tip to Zerohedge for being on this from the beginning, I could tease out some of the story just by following the progression of the headlines, especially in light of China’s big changes in attitude towards foreign capital.

Over the past 2 years China has cracked down on a number of sectors within its economy. It started with the moves on Hong Kong and the extradition law which sparked huge protests in the summer of 2019. It evolved into the curious disappearance from public life for months of Alibaba CEO Jack Ma. This summer we saw China uproot the cryptocurrency market by kicking out all of the bitcoin miners over a weekend, they’ve doubled down on this policy again recently.

In September 2019 I wrote that I thought China’s moves on Hong Kong were pre-emptive moves to undermine British influence there through the banking system. Because, the protests in Hong Kong last year looked an awful lot like Portland’s and Minsk’s and Kiev’s (2014) etc. etc.

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China Braces for ‘Nightmare Scenario’ As Evergrande Offers Broke Investors Discounted Apartments, by Tyler Durden

We’re keeping an eye on Evergrande because it’s big and interconnected enough that it could be the first domino falling in a chain reaction that leads to a global financial crisis. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Up until now the collapse of China’s Evergrande was very much a slow motion affair, captured perhaps best by Forte Securities trader Keith Temperton who said that “the Asian banks will get hit hard if there’s a default, but then there will be a 10-year recovery process. The market’s getting a hang of it. The way they’ve managed the news flow seems quite clever. They haven’t let a swathe of bad news at once.” But while Beijing was indeed successful in extending the period of collapse as long as possible, now that Evergrande is effectively insolvent and having suspended its bonds from trading we have finally gotten to the endgame and the realization that hundreds of billions in capital (Evergrande’s total debt was just over $300 billion) is gone for ever.

This realization has already prompted angry protesters at China Evergrande Group offices across the country as the developer has fallen further behind on promises to more than 70,000 investors. Construction of unfinished properties with enough floor space to cover three-fourths of Manhattan grinds to a halt, leaving more than a million homebuyers in limbo.

In an effort to appease its angry (and very soon, poor) stakeholders, Evergrande plans to let consumers and staff bid on discounted properties this month to repay them for billions in overdue investment products as the embattled developer seeks to preserve cash, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg, the company will organize an online property event by Sept. 30 for investors who opt for discounted real estate in lieu of cash, said two employees who were briefed on an internal call Thursday and asked not to be identified. The world’s most-indebted property developer is pushing the discounted real estate as the preferred of three options for angry investors seeking repayments.

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China’s “Lehman Moment” arrives on 13th Anniversary Of Lehman Bankruptcy: Beijing Tells Banks Evergrande Won’t Pay Interest, by Tyler Durden

It looks like the Chinese government is going to let a company that many thought was too big to fail, fail. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Yesterday, when covering the non-stop drama surrounding China’s most insolvent property developer, Evergrande, we said that it would be remarkably ironic if Evergrande were to announce a default – which everyone knows is coming – today, on the 13th anniversary of Lehman’s bankruptcy filing on Sept 15, 2008.

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Evergrande Bonds Halted Amid Liquidation Panic As Contagion Spreads To Other Chinese Junk, by Tyler Durden

Evergrande is a giant property development company in China and financially it is on its last gasps before it is underwater. If it goes under the reverberations will be global. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

With algos busy chasing upward momentum in futures and global stocks, the biggest – if largely ignored story – remain the ongoing collapse of “China’s Lehman“, the $300+ billion China Evergrande, where following our earlier reports (see below) that a bank run  emerged among creditors of the biggest and most indebted Chinese developer as its bonds were no longer eligible collateral in the repo market after a ratings downgrade, on Monday the rout went from bad to catastrophic as various Evergrande bonds crashed amid a liquidation frenzy, prompting China’s stock exchanges to halt trade.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange said in a statement that it had temporarily suspended trading in China Evergrande Group’s 6.98% July 2022 corporate bond following “abnormal fluctuations.” The exchange had also suspended trading in the bond on Friday.

Shanghai exchange data showed the bonds sliding more than 25% to a low of 40.18 yuan after the resumption of trade on Monday afternoon. The company’s 5.9% May 2023 Shenzhen-traded bond , which was also suspended, fell more than 35% after trading resumed. China Chengxin International Credit Rating Co (CCXI) downgraded Evergrande and its onshore bonds to AA from AAA on Thursday, and placed the company and its bonds on a watchlist for further downgrades, effectively freezing the company out of the repo market.

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Western Media Misrepresents Situation in China, by Jerry Grey

Western media regurgitates scripts written by the intelligence community and Deep State. Right now they have China in their sites. From Jerry Grey at antiwar.com:

One of the most important skills a journalist needs is the skill of research. Proper research and investigation even into the most-simple of stories is vitally important, news should be accurate, verified and unbiased. However, when it comes to China, Western news is often very wrong. Sometimes erroneous but given the number of errors, this seems unlikely and certainly unprofessional. Sometimes we’re led to conclusions along a biased interpretative path by the journalist, the editor or the publishers’ prejudices. Sometimes it’s more pervasive, such as the PR campaign of the US Senate’s recent $300 million allocation to encourage journalists to find “negative articles related to China’s Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) causing some journalists to focus on rewards instead of ethics.

A representative of the Financial Times, one of the world’s most respected newspapers provided an interesting example in a tweet a few days ago. FT’s Global China Editor, James Kynge, no doubt in his personal capacity, showed his true colors. His obvious belief that the Communist Party of China (CPC), never tells the truth, is exposed by the words “as ever…”, indicating that he doesn’t believe anything China has previously officially reported. He then goes on to use an interpretation of part of a speech given by Xi Jinping where the words “头破血流” (Tóupòxiěliú) were used.

These words can be variously translated. Google translates them as “battered”, the Chinese historical novel Journey to the West translated to English in 1983 by Anthony C Yu, for dramatic effect described, as: “blood gushing out and their heads split open”. The official CPC translation described them as a collision course as in: “…anyone who would attempt to do so (bully China) will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel.”

Whatever the interpretation, when taken in context with the rest of the speech where President XI spoke of: “Peace, concord, and harmony…” then (China…) “does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes”, as well as “we will remain committed to promoting peace” it’s quite apparent that the meaning is not an “over-dramatised” interpretation of a threat but of peaceful progress into the future. While, at the same time, letting the world know that the country which was bullied in the past has come of age and will no longer be victimised. There’s nothing sinister or threatening in this, unless you’re the bully!

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The Lobster in Beijing’s Pot, by Anne Stevenson-Yang

The Chinese government is showing China’s entrepreneurs, executives, and financiers who’s boss. From Anne Stevenson-Yang at themarket.ch:

The fiasco surrounding the IPO of the Chinese ride-hailing service Didi is a warning signal: Beijing is taking increasingly tough action against capital outflows from the People’s Republic. This is a red flag for investors in Chinese internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.

Bright-orange splotches appear on Gila monsters when they want to show that they can spew poison if predators mess with them. Male dogs hump females. And when Chinese companies make billions in portable, hard currency by listing overseas, as Didi Global Inc. (DIDI) did in its IPO on June 30, Chinese regulators flex their muscles.

The wishful among the investment community see this as a one-off. It is a tectonic shift.

China’s July 4 order to halt new downloads of the Didi app on the excuse that user data security was being compromised tanked the new listing and led to comments by Chinese officials about how companies really need to get their approval before an IPO.

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Et Tu, NASA? Wokeness goes to space. Oh, and cheese is racist. by Simon Black

Simon Black’s weekly chronicle of the absurd, at sovereignman.com:

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

Drug overdose deaths surged during lockdowns

The rate of US drug overdose deaths surged during the pandemic lockdowns, accounting for up to nearly 20,000 additional deaths.

The CDC measures the number of US drug overdose deaths over the previous year. In September of 2019, 68,757 people had died of a drug overdose in the previous year.

By September 2020, the number of deaths in the previous year rose to 87,203.

The biggest leap in deaths (+3,643) occurred between April and May 2020— just after lockdowns began in most of the US.

The CDC also notes that these numbers may be “Underreported due to incomplete data.” In other words, it’s likely that thousands more drug overdose deaths were ‘erroneously’ counted as COVID-19 deaths…

Click here to read the data from the CDC.

NASA shifts goal from space exploration to space diversity

NASA has been a driving force of scientific innovation and advancement ever since its creation in the 1950s.

After more than six decades of space exploration, you’d think NASA would be an organization free of petty politics and idiotic logic.

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Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Has Been Missing For 2 Months, by Tyler Durden

Maybe this is what the Chinese call capitalism with socialist characteristics. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

About 14 months ago during an interview with Real Vision, investor Kyle Bass – who has been one of the most prominent American critics of the Chinese Communist Party, while also anticipating the political troubles in Hong Kong that inspired the protest movement of 2019 – predicted that retiring Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma would be “disappeared” by Beijing within a year. The gist of Bass’s argument was that Ma had outlived his usefulness, and that Beijing would never tolerate a billionaire with so much power and influence, both at home, and in the West.

As it turns out, Bass was off by about 1 month. Because following some rumblings published by the FT on New Year’s Eve, it appears the Western press has just woken up to the fact that nobody has seen Jack Ma in two months. Late last night in New York, Yahoo Finance reported that Jack Ma is officially ‘missing’.

The FT reported a few days ago that Ma had been abruptly replaced by an Alibaba executive for the taping of the finale of his show “Africa’s Business Heroes”.

Mr Ma was replaced as a judge in the final of Africa’s Business Heroes, a television contest for budding entrepreneurs, his photograph was removed from the judging webpage, and he was conspicuously left out of a promotional video.

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China: The Conquest of Hollywood, by Judith Bergman

Hollywood celebrities and executives are a lot kinder to the Chinese government than they’ve been to Donald Trump. From Judith Bergman at gatestoneinstitute.com:

  • One Hollywood producer told PEN America that suggestions for projects critical of China aroused the fear that “you or your company will actively be blacklisted, and they will interfere with your current or future project. So not only will you bear the brunt [of your decision], but also your company, and future companies that you work for. And that’s absolutely in the back of our minds.”
  • “It’s not just the Hollywood issue, it’s not just the tech issue, it’s not just the basketball or the sports issue, or various other industries. … It’s all across the board. To get products and services into that market, there are certain rules you have to play… so they allow you access to the consumers. But those processes… have gotten worse and worse… and more amplified over time…. [It]has got to the point where we either need to stop it now and fight back, or we are just going to lose….” — Chris Fenton, Hollywood executive and author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business. voanews.com, October 16, 2020.
  • The problem is much larger than just the movie business.
In October, for the first time, China overtook North America as the world’s largest film market. Pictured: Wang Jianlin (second from left), chairman of China’s Wanda Group, attends the opening ceremony of the Wanda Qingdao Movie Metropolis, billed as “China’s answer to Hollywood,” in Qingdao on April 28, 2018. (Photo by Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)

In October, for the first time, China overtook North America as the world’s largest film market. “Movie ticket sales in China for 2020 climbed to $1.988 billion on Sunday, surpassing North America’s total of $1.937 billion, according to data from Artisan Gateway. The gap is expected to widen considerably by year’s end,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter on October 18. “Analysts have long predicted that the world’s most populous country would one day top the global charts. But the results still represent a historic sea change”.

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Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent DARPA Experiments Raise Concern Amid Coronavirus Outbreak, by Whitney Webb

Neither the American nor the Chinese government have clean hands when it comes to bioweapons research. From Whitney Webb at thelastamericanvagabond.com:

DARPA recently spent millions on research involving bats and coronaviruses, as well as gene editing “bioweapons” prior to the recent coronavirus outbreak. Now, “strategic allies” of the agency have been chosen to develop a genetic material-based vaccine to halt the potential epidemic.

WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks, concern over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to develop into a global pandemic.

As concerns about the future of the ongoing outbreak have grown, so too have the number of theories speculating about the outbreak’s origin, many of which blame a variety of state actors and/or controversial billionaires. This has inevitably led to efforts to clamp down on “misinformation” related to the coronavirus outbreak from both mainstream media outlets and major social media platforms.

However, while many of these theories are clearly speculative, there is also verifiable evidence regarding the recent interest of one controversial U.S. government agency in novel coronaviruses, specifically those transmitted from bats to humans. That agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons labs bordering China and resulted in the discovery of dozens of new coronavirus strains as recently as last April. Furthermore, the ties of the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to a virology institute in Wuhan, China — where the current outbreak is believed to have begun — have been unreported in English language media thus far.

While it remains entirely unknown as to what caused the outbreak, the details of DARPA’s and the Pentagon’s recent experimentation are clearly in the public interest, especially considering that the very companies recently chosen to develop a vaccine to combat the coronavirus outbreak are themselves strategic allies of DARPA. Not only that, but these DARPA-backed companies are developing controversial DNA and mRNA vaccines for this particular coronavirus strain, a category of vaccine that has never previously been approved for human use in the United States.

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