Get ready for Tokyo 2020. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) evidently thought it better to go with safe instead of exotic but risky (Istanbul) or bargain-basement (Madrid, which pitched a “low financial investment” Olympics). It announced Tokyo’s selection today.
Chinese local governments hit the jackpot this week. In Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou, land parcels sold for record prices, crowning a slew of new “land kings,” as Chinese slang refers to record-setting plots. Here’s a roundup of the highlights:
Trading of the Chinese yuan has “surged” (pdf) in the last three years, according to the Bank of International Settlements, with $120 billion now traded each day, up from $34 billion in 2010. In the ranking of the world’s most traded currencies, that drove the yuan from 17th place in 2010 to ninth place this year, leapfrogging New Zealand’s dollar (ranked #10) and elbowing the Swedish krona out of the top 10.
Considering China’s massive debt problem, investors might be wary of the country’s banking sector. But relax: Chinese banks are doing just peachy. In fact, as David Cui, China strategist at BofA Merrill Lynch, flags in a note today, “banks alone accounted for 56% of total market earnings” of mainland-listed companies. Here’s a look at that:
Get rich and not only can you buy a fancy car; you can probably afford a longer life, right? After all, in the US, wealthy elderly live 5% to 10% longer than poorer seniors. Not so in the case of Costa Rica. As it turns out, the country is home to one of the five global pockets of extreme longevity (the others are in Italy, Greece, Japan and the US). And new scientific research suggests that the area’s residents don’t live long in spite of their penury; they’re still kicking because of it.
Taiwanese authorities have arrested three former heads of HTC, a leading Taiwanese smartphone maker, on suspicion of handing trade secrets over to the city government of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, as Reuters reports, citing Next Magazine.
Chinese local governments have taken on scary levels of debt—12.1 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion), by some estimates. That’s scary for the central government, which will be on the hook to bail out any Chinese Detroits. But it’s scary for residents, too.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics just revised its 2012 GDP calculations, shaving 38 billion yuan ($6.2 billion)—an amount just about equal to Kyrgyzstan’s entire economy—off last year’s output. That means last year’s GDP grew only 7.7% from 2011, compared with the original calculation of 7.8%. (That still means China hit the government’s 7.5% 2012 GDP growth target, though.) Here’s how that looks:
In building drones that kill people, the US has a couple-decade head start on China. But when it comes to domestic uses, US businesses are hamstrung because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) isn’t required to issue commercial drone rules until 2015. In the meantime, one of China’s biggest delivery companies is tinkering with using drones—with Chinese government permission.
Texhong Textile Group, one of China’s biggest textile makers, has been shifting production to Vietnam, and the market loves it, reports Bloomberg—the stock is up 445% from a year ago.
Japan has been struggling to wrest itself free of its deflationary spiral since the 1990s.
China’s banks are increasingly nervous that some of the $18 trillion in outstanding loans (paywall) on their books won’t be paid back, as the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported today. That’s despite the fact that the country’s official recording of bad loans is still at an extremely healthy level. As of June, non-performing loans (NPLs), as they’re called, made up only 0.96% of total lending, a slight increase from 0.95% in June 2012.
Wealthy Chinese have been snapping up overseas real estate and foreign stocks of late. And this year that spending is set to grow another 30%, says a recent report by Bain & Company and China Merchants Bank.
This post has been corrected.
South Korea has long been the world’s pioneer of human improvement through words ending in “-oplasty.” The country has helped paved the way for double-eyelid surgeries, dimple injections, calf reductions and even double-jaw surgery, to name a few.
This item has been corrected.
Last week about a million cockroaches swarmed Dafeng, a city in Jiangsu province. The source was a nearby plastic greenhouse that was vandalized by an “unknown perpetrator.” Yet the saboteur might be less interesting than what he sabotaged: A medicinal cockroach farm.
China has a chronic debt problem. And its soaring housing prices—Beijing’s were up 18.3% in July compared with last year—are getting fairly bubbly. That cocktail is mighty similar to what caused the United States financial crisis—so could a US-style sub-prime debacle happen in China?
Years of excessive investment are catching up with China, and the latest example is coal. Its reserves now contain 220 million tons (200 million tonnes) of coal, as the Hao Hao Report notes. That puts China on track to have as much as 440 million tons by the end of 2013, according to the China National Coal Association (CNCA)—around 40% more than the combined weight of the entire human population.
The latest news on Thailand’s economy has been grim. Not only did the country enter a recession (paywall) in the second quarter of this year, but it increasingly faces the twin specters of rising household debt and capital outflows.
Imagine a stock that jumps 25.5% on its first day of trading, coming to rest at $159 a share. Three months later, though, shares tank, plummeting to $54. Now, 17 months after going public, it’s worth $58.70.
China’s economy may be coming in for a soft landing, by the looks of the latest data on manufacturing output. The “flash” preview of China’s purchasing managers index (PMI) for August came in at 50.1, much better than expected. This came after a resurgence in industrial production in July.
The first of the two-day trial of disgraced Chinese Communist party official Bo Xilai was closely followed on—where else?—China’s microblogging platform Sina Weibo, which also happened to be the main source of information about the trial, thanks to an official courtroom feed. While most elements of the trial were carefully stage-managed, it wasn’t exactly the victory parade for China’s ruling politicians that many expected. That’s because of a few surprises:
Yesterday, Reuters warned of an emerging trend in China: rising demand for foreign currency among China’s banking customers, who bought 24.5 billion yuan ($4 billion) more of it in July than they did in June.
