Tech companies, healthcare giants, defense contractors, top universities, the US government—you name it, Chinese cyber-spies have probably hacked it. And now, it seems likely, we can add one of the world’s preeminent marine research groups to the list.
The first blow always comes out of the sky behind you. ”It was like a huge electric shock ran through my body,” described one victim, “but also like I got hit in the head with a two-by-four all at the same time.” More fortunate victims have likened it to a ”searing, intense scrape,” or say it’s like “a kitten has been set on your head, claws out.”
China’s trade data have been a reliable monthly horror show over the last year, and September was no exception (link in Chinese). Exports fell nearly 4% from year-earlier levels, while imports dove an astonishing 20%.
China is a bachelor nation, with some 33 million more men than it has women to marry them. The glut of “bare branches,” as these arithmetically unmarriageable men are called, will only begin ebbing between 2030 and 2050.
Even more so than most Nobel Prize recipients, Tu Youyou’s victory can be hailed as a triumph of very many things—of Chinese women, of under-recognized scholars, of Chinese ingenuity.
Drizzled in butter or slathered in mayo—or heaped atop 100% all-natural Angus beef, perhaps? The question of how you like your lobster roll is no longer the sole province of foodies, coastal New Englanders, and people who summer in Maine. American lobster has gone mainstream, launching food trucks from Georgia to Oregon, and debuting on menus at McDonald’s and Shake Shack.
China’s biggest economic woe isn’t its stock market, the yuan’s value, or the size of its foreign reserves. It’s simply that Chinese companies are making way more stuff than anyone wants.
The Lee dynasty that runs Singapore has always been touchy about criticism. Like his father, the late Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister Lee Hsien Loong and his People’s Action Party (PAP) have a habit of suing their detractors for defamation or for “scandalizing the court,” leaving many of them in financial ruin.
Things have settled down some since last Monday (Aug. 24), when fears of the next global financial crisis churned markets—and stomachs—everywhere. Major North American and European indexes finished the week just above where they had started it. Still, a queasiness lingers in the fact that there’s no good explanation for why the Chinese stock meltdown spread to trading floors across the Western world.
This week’s Chinese stock market implosion has been widely viewed as a reaction to the Chinese government’s devaluing the yuan on Aug. 11—a move many presume was a frenzied bid to lower export prices and strengthen the economy.
In the immortal words of the nuns in The Sound of Music, how do you hold a wave upon the sand? Central bankers in China would like to know, as they struggle to stop the tide of speculative capital now flowing out of the country.
Another asset bubble has burst in China. And it’s not in stocks, metals or real estate. It’s the market for a maize-colored organ carved out of a giant, endangered Mexican fish.
Imagine a fish-eating contest between a great white shark and a human. Odds would obviously favor the shark. But widen the contest to include all sharks versus all of humanity? Not a fair fight at all. Sharks have mouths, we have trawls. They have teeth, we have industrial fish-processing factories. They have stomachs; we have canneries and the freezer section at the local supermarket.
Of the many reams of iffy Chinese economic data, the iffiest of all must be the urban unemployment rate.
Forget beef, bread, and beans. Growth from factory farming will increasingly come not from the land, but from the sea. The latest sign comes from a bid by Cargill, the agriculture giant, to buy a leading Norwegian salmon-feed supplier for just shy of €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion). If successful, the deal will make Cargill one of the top three aquaculture feed suppliers in the world.
In a new ranking of the world’s biggest banks, Chinese institutions have grabbed four out of five of the top berths. The list, created by SNL Financial, is based on total assets. The bank at the top, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, boasts $3.5 trillion in assets—a loan book worth more than Britain’s annual output, as CNN notes.
It may be the dead of summer in the northern hemisphere right now, but the must-have clothing item for white collar women isn’t a breezy blouse and matching culottes. It’s a desk blanket. Female office workers around the world brace for hot weather by bundling up—even as their male colleagues type away in shirtsleeves.
June was an unusually cruel month for the Chinese stock markets—and yet, somehow, July outdid it.
Selling shares on China’s super-volatile stock market isn’t just discouraged by the government: It might be illegal.
The Chinese government’s determined efforts to recreate a bull market in stocks—perhaps we should call it a mechanical bull?—are getting pretty bumpy, as the Shanghai Composite’s 8.5% drop today attests. If Beijing is hoping for ordinary investors to pile back in to the market, the cause might already be lost. Signs are emerging suggest that investors are turning their attention back to another asset class: real estate.
Yet another boxing movie packed with punches and clichés hits American theaters this weekend. Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, starring a thick, veiny Jake Gyllenhaal, has a story we’ve heard before: A hardened man with a loyal woman spins out of control and has to fight for redemption for a chance to be with his daughter. But the story of how this film got made is anything but cookie-cutter.
In case you turned away from China’s economic carnage for a moment, some surprising news: China’s stock crash has turned itself inside out.
Sneakily but steadily, the Chinese government is pumping torrents of money into its banks. And many trillions of yuan have been flowing into stocks via the interbank lending markets.
In the year since June 2014, around 23 trillion yuan ($3.7 trillion) suddenly appeared in the Chinese stock markets. And then, even more quickly than they gushed in, trillions of those yuan simply evaporated.
