“That year also marked the all-time high point for satisfaction with democracy.” In 2005, just 38.7% of citizens globally were dissatisfied with democracy. “Since then, the proportion of dissatisfied citizens has risen by 18.8% to an all-time 57.5% high.”
This leap in dissatisfaction is led by the US, Brazil, Nigeria and Mexico. But America’s surge has been most pronounced. Having spent many post-war decades with fewer than 25% of our citizens reporting dissatisfaction, a 55% majority are now dissatisfied with democracy.
The problem with that is twofold. A healthy democracy requires the vast majority to believe in fair elections. Checks. Balances. Institutions of integrity. Rule of law. Respect by the majority for rights of the minority. If that faith is lost, then each faction quite rationally fights to dominate its opponents at all costs, by any means. That is tribalism.
Which leads to the second problem – America was built by immigrants who left tribalism behind. Working together we’ve shown humanity the great wonders achievable through cooperation, integration, assimilation. Optimism. Idealism.
“For much of its modern history, America has viewed itself as a ‘shining city on a hill’ – a model democracy, and one that can serve as an example unto others that wish to emulate its success,” wrote the report’s authors. “Following the 2008 financial crisis, however, that has begun to change, with Americans’ evaluation of the functioning of their political system continuing to deteriorate year on year.
Rising political polarization, government shutdowns, the widespread use of public office for private gain, a costly war in Iraq, and growing spatial and intergenerational inequality have all weighed against Americans’ view of the ability of their democracy to deliver.”
What will happen when a majority of citizens in the world’s leading democracy, its largest economy, and mightiest military, lose faith in its very foundation?
‘Mini’ Mike Bloomberg Tries Insulting Trump, Falls Short With Awkward Height Metaphor
Mike Bloomberg attempted to punch back after President Trump made disparaging comments about his height, saying “I stand twice as tall as he does on the stage – on the stage that matters.”
Bloomberg was responding to comments Trump made to Fox News in a pre-Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity.
When asked what he thinks of the former New York Mayor, the 6′ 3″ Trump replied “Very little. I just think of little. You know, now he wants a box for the debates to stand on. OK. It’s OK. There’s nothing wrong. You can be short. Why should he get a box to stand on. He wants a box for the debates. Why should he be entitled? Does that mean everyone else gets a box?“
Bloomberg’s campaign also slapped back, with campaign spokeswoman Julie Wood saying in a statement “The president is lying,” adding “He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan.”
Meanwhile, it appears that Bloomberg may be even shorter than he says he is…
So now – with the Democratic National Committee changing the rules to allow Bloomberg to participate in future primary debates, all eyes will be focused on ‘mini’ Mike. Maybe they’ll stick him next to 6′ tall Joe Biden.
Never fear Mike, White Knight Jim Acosta has your back!
Many major U.S. cities run by liberal Democrats are in rough shape. They are afflicted by the problems of homelessness, violent crime, gangs, and unemployment to a far greater degree than the country as a whole. Consider the following:
Chicago’s violence and gang-related drug problems are well-known. What’s less well-known is that the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1927. The city’s finances — like most Democratically-run major cities — are in shambles. At the end of 2015, according to a 2017 report by the Fiscal Times, Chicago had assets of just $4.7 billion against liabilities of more than $14 billion, a funded ratio of barely 33%.
The homeless population in Los Angeles has risen from a staggering 33,000 in 2010 to over 55,000 in 2018. The city — already dominated by a liberal super-majority of legislators — has just recently pushed through massive local tax increases designed to address the homeless crisis.
San Francisco actually has maps so people can track where the worst incidences of human waste are on the sidewalks. The homeless population now approaches 7000 and there is no law prohibiting sleeping on the streets, sidewalks, or other public places. Discarded syringes are everywhere. San Francisco’s property crime rate is the highest in the nation and “smash and grab” thefts involving broken car windows are so commonplace that repair shops have waiting lists. The DA’s office no longer prosecutes “victimless” crimes like prostitution or drug possession, resulting in a massive influx of drug dealers into the city.
Frighteningly similar situations exist is nearly every other major Democrat-run city, all around the nation:
In New York City, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Hartford, CT, Newark, Philadelphia and on and on, the story follows the same pattern: Homelessness, high crime, underwater finances, soft policing, lax immigration control (often sanctuary cities), high taxes, and business-averse regulations. It’s a guaranteed formula for failure.
When Democrats are in control, cities tend to go soft on crime, reward cronies with public funds, establish hostile business environments, heavily tax the most productive citizens and set up fat pensions for their union friends. Simply put, theirs is a Blue State blueprint for disaster.
The question, of course, is why? Why do they choose to govern like that? Can anything about the efficacy and propriety of liberal governing doctrine be extrapolated from these examples?
The answer is a resounding “yes.” To boil down the essential difference between conservative and liberal governing philosophy into the simplest terms, it would be this:
Conservatives believe in equal opportunity.
Liberals believe in equal outcome.
The conservative’s view of government’s role in society (after fulfilling its fundamental responsibilities of national defense, common-sense safety/liability regulations, environmental protections and providing a basic social safety net for those in a temporarily disadvantageous situation) is to set up the game pieces such that those choosing to participate have a reasonably equal chance of winning.
Not perfectly equal, perhaps, but a reasonable shot at success. In the conservative paradigm, individual initiative, hard work and a bit of luck can eliminate almost all the barriers to educational, professional and financial achievement.
In contrast, liberal doctrine stipulates an equal outcome for all people. Their view of government is that its responsibility is to ensure that every individual has at least a minimally acceptable share of society’s spoils (that share being quite arbitrarily determined by liberal politicians, according to their whims and the political exigencies in effect at the time). Liberal governing practices of wealth redistribution, punitive taxation, excessive regulations designed to impede runaway capitalistic profits and “cover every contingency” individual benefit programs all combine to produce — in many instances — the unintended consequence of short-circuiting personal initiative and ambition. Instead, these excessive giveaway programs essentially “teach” some people how to game the system and get the government to pay for their existence in society. That’s not the original intent, but that’s how it ends up playing out in many cases.
Liberal cities are governed by the guiding tenets of softness, misplaced “compassion,” and individual unaccountability. Examples include:
Hands-off policing style (NYC has long since abandoned the highly successful stop-and-frisk practices of the Giuliani years that led to low street crime).
Sanctuary cities, which give rise to higher incidents of crime, poverty, unemployment, and the wasting of taxpayer-funded public resources because of the undocumented population’s draining effect on the community.
The inexplicable decision of cities like Boston to no longer prosecute crimes such as shoplifting and breaking and entering, leading to urban stores not being able to remain open and be profitable (thus denying the community of a valuable resource).
Widespread locally approved abuse of the SNAP/EBT program, allowing its acceptance for alcohol and other nonessential items.
Explicit sanctioning of sleeping on the street or other common public areas and unrestricted public loitering.
Liberal policies have worked almost perfectly to degrade the quality of inner-city life for their residents to the point of abject unacceptability. Instead of raising the standard of living for all the city’s inhabitants, excessive giveaways (too often offered without requiring adequate, verifiable proof-of-need) and lax or missing enforcement of local laws and edicts have the opposite effect — such governmental practice only teaches people that they are forever unaccountable as regards the purported norms of society and that they will be given their daily sustenance for free, without putting forth any commensurate effort on their part. In short, overindulgence by local city governments denies the notion of ownership over their own lives to the lower strata of society. That notion of self-ownership over the control and ultimate destiny of one’s life is absolutely critical to a well-functioning society. Without that sense of personal responsibility, there is no civilized order.
There is an old cliché that speaks perfectly to the societal dangers inherent when the individual does not feel the responsibility of ownership: “No one ever washes a rented car.” Liberal cities are strewn with the abandoned, rusted hulks of rented cars, their rotting carcasses a blight on the landscape, indisputable testimony to failed Democratic policy.
Thai Doctors “Cure” Coronavirus Patient Using Powerful AIDS Drugs
A couple of days ago, Zero Hedge decided to highlight a string of tweets by respected epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding wherein he noted some unusual characteristics of the novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019) that has swept across nearly two dozen countries since emerging in the central Chinese city of Wuhan last year.
Scientists trying to trace the evolution of the virus in order to understand how to contain it using knowledge gleaned from previous coronavirus outbreaks (SARS and MERS among them) discovered something strange: Initially, researchers believed that they had found a string of genetic code that hasn’t been present in other coronavirus strains, but is similar to strains found in “the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag.”
Now, Dr. Feigl-Ding later pointed out that subsequent research confirmed that some similarities have, in fact, been found in other known coronavirus strains. The similarities are certainly interesting.
Let’s move now to the front lines of the outbreak, where doctors in Beijing and elsewhere in China have started using popular retrovirals commonly employed in the treatment of AIDS. So much so that the US and drug companies have reportedly upped shipments of the drugs to China to assist in containing the outbreak. Another unusual trait: the virus binds to the same receptors as HIV.
Some have suggested that these oddities indicate nCoV was possibly engineered by scientists working to create a powerful new bioweapon – though these claims have been ridiculed and dismissed out of hand by the mainstream press.
Offering some more evidence that this wasn’t just some fluke, a team of Thai doctors told the Bangkok Post that the use of anti-flu an AIDS drugs has been a huge success as the country with the largest number of infected patients tries to contain the outbreak within its own borders.
Two doctors from Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok (Dr. Kriangsak Atipornwanich and Associate Professor Dr. Subsai Kongsangdao) decided to use oseltamivir, an anti-flu drug used to treat MERS along with lopinavir and ritonavir, two AIDS drugs that had been used with some success in Beijing, to treat a female patient whose condition was rapidly deteriorating.
The patient was admitted to Hua Hin Hospital then transferred to Rajavithi Hospital on Jan. 29.
“We checked related information and found anti-flu drugs were effective on MERS so we combined both groups of medications,” he said. “After poor lab tests for 10 days, the test finally turned positive after 48 hours of administering the medications. The treatment, as well as the recovery, is fast.”
Doctors from the Thai Public Health Ministry also said at a briefing on Sunday that the number of patients in Thailand has climbed to 19.
So, the coronavirus responds to a combination of meds used to treat the flu and AIDS? If we were going to create a super frankenvirus, that’s where we’d probably start.
Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday, Campus Reform Digital Reporter Eduardo Neret went to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. to ask students about President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated, $10 million Super Bowl commercial.
Neret first asked students if the NFL should prevent Trump from airing the ad, given his past feuds with the league.
WATCH:
One student replied yes, adding that “[the Super Bowl] should remain nonpartisan.”
“The Super Bowl should kind of be about bringing fans together and not necessarily about political campaigns,” another student added.
Others disagreed.
“I think if [the NFL and TV networks] want to promote freedom of speech, I think they should allow anybody from the right or left side of the aisle to promote what they want,” one student added.
Neret also asked students to name an accomplishment Trump should highlight in his commercial. Some students were unable to name an achievement of the Trump presidency, while others cited things like the economy and unemployment.
“Do you think there’s anything good that [Trump has] done as president that he could talk about in the commercial,” Neret asked one student.
The student responded by saying “no,” and that he doesn’t “like Trump.”
Trump and Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg both spent millions to air ads during the Super Bowl. According to Politico, Bloomberg dropped $10 million for an ad promoting one of his signature issues, gun control.
Coronavirus Overkill? Gas Mask-Wearing Man Panics American Airlines Flight In Texas
At a moment that virus masks and other protective clothing are in high demand and are increasingly a feature among travelers at busy international hubs, a bizarre incident caused a security scare aboard an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Houston late last week.
Fox reports a man caused flight passengers to briefly panic after he boarded wearing a full gas mask. “The flight was delayed an hour because the unidentified man refused to take off the mask, causing passengers to panic,” according to the report.
An unidentified man wearing a gas mask is seen aboard an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Houston, via ABC/Twitter.
Security board the aircraft before take-off to remove the man after he reportedly told others around him he “wanted to make a statement”. This caused fears that he could have been planning some sort of event or attack and that the mask was “for his own safety”.
“I had a seat in the back,” one eyewitness told Houston ABC station KTRK. “I looked up and saw a guy coming onto the plane wearing a full gas mask, which was kind of odd. He didn’t have a filter though — which I thought was even more strange.”
“Immediately, people start talking in the back of the plane,” the eyewitness added. “You couldn’t see his face. You couldn’t identify any features on him. People were worried he had sneaked something on board and that he had the mask for his own safety.”
“My gut reaction was that he was probably worried about the coronavirus and had put on the gas mask as overkill kind of protection,” the man explained further. “But then I noticed it didn’t have the filter, so that didn’t really make sense.”
Fox described that it “appeared to be an odd reach for shock value” given in the aftermath American Airlines issued a statement saying the man was later cooperative and flew without the mask on a separate flight.
It is important to acknowledge the path forward does not always take us where we would like to go. We as a country and society do not always have as much control over our fate as we tend to believe. Starting life as an idealist that had high hopes for mankind and society, I have become jaded over the years by man’s shortcomings. The combination of laziness, shortsightedness and several other negative traits have weakened my belief our government and society will do the right thing when push comes to shove. The less you leave in the hands of those who couldn’t care less about your fate the better off you will be.
Hunting By Stampeding Your Prey Over A Cliff
Unfortunately, our economy and financial system have been crafted in a way that places our fate in the hands of those who often don’t care about us as individuals. Those in control often do not have “skin in the game” and are not positioned to be held accountable if the system fails. An image of an effective hunting technique can be seen in the picture of Buffalo Jump Wyoming on the right. In the past hunters were known to stampede their prey over the edge of a steep cliff.
This image is in some ways an analogy to the fate I envision awaiting those who have willingly placed their wealth in the hands of others.Far too much faith has been placed in governments doing the right thing. The term “public servant” stands as a monument to our gullibility as a society. In reality few of those employed by the government carry out their duties because of dedication and devotion. Generally, power and compensation coupled with security and little downside or risk are why people choose to take a job in government.
In our modern culture, we as individuals are often far removed from the wealth we have accumulated. At one-time people were surrounded by tangible items representing where their wealth was stored but today that is less common. Now, much of our savings flow into paper or digital promises such as stocks or pensions plans. The further away from us our wealth is removed and stored the less control we have over it. Some people have almost 25% of their pay withheld and placed in a retirement vehicle with only a pledge it will be returned with interest several decades from now. These people are very vulnerable to the possibility their money will vanish into the dark.
Liquidity floats all boats until it doesn’t but that is the part of this economic farce we have yet to see play out. When this happens the inflow of liquidity from policies that have concentrated far too much wealth into equity markets will reverse. This will trigger a negative ripple effect that strikes all segments of the economy and financial sectors. The natural laws of economics dictate that at some point going through the pain of an economic crisis becomes preferable to expanding a bubble that carries with it devastating side-effects. This doesn’t mean we will be given a choice, most likely the general direction we take will be dictated by events outside our control. The possibilities of nuclear war or the current global pandemic are just two examples.
Inequality Is A Growing Problem (click to enlarge)
We are moving down the current path at a time when inequality has exploded. Still, many people are buying into the line that things have never been better. The question is, better for who? After adjusting for real-world inflation many households have seen their net income and wealth decline over the last decade. Despite the endless media propaganda about growth and recovery, it is self-evident to anyone who bothers to look closely that the rich and powerful are increasingly grabbing a larger slice of the economic pie. This is an issue society must address in one form or another.
A recent post questioned the sanity of a market that values Tesla as the second most valuable carmaker on the planet. Tesla’s recent rally has pushed its market value to over $85 billion making it the most valuable US automaker in history with its market cap more than Ford and GM combined. It should be noted that Tesla has never even produced 400 thousand cars in one year and less than a million during its history. Still, within days Tesla’s valuation again jumped, this time to over $100 billion taking it above the world’s second most valuable carmaker, VW, which sold over 10 million vehicles last year.” Now it trails only behind Toyota.
All the money and credit being unleashed by central banks is the equivalent of printing tokens and placing them in digital accounts that can vanish in the blink of an eye. It does not necessarily create real wealth. Oddly enough, this is something the world has come to accept overtime. Belief in a broken or poorly designed system does not mean it will fulfill its desired task. How long we can ignore these flaws before they come back to haunt us is questionable but the seed of financial destruction has begun to grow. This can be seen in our growing debt both public and private as well as in pension plans which are massively underfunded.
This article is not intended to provide glorious answers but to remind and warn you that articles on many media outlets such as the ones titled; A quarter of millennials say they’ve saved $100,000 — here’s how they did it! or This Earnings Season Is Better Than You Think are misleading at best. Like many of you, I’m troubled by a future that is hurling at us with ever greater speed and for which, in reality, all of us have very limited control. Years ago I started this blog as a way to express my views and exchange ideas on a variety of subjects. With that in mind, it is a good time to point out that nobody can time or predict when the economy will fall out of bed but we are in uncharted waters and caution is warranted.
BuzzFeed Journo Reportedly Blogged About Pedo Fantasies, Rape Jokes And Doxing
A BuzzFeed senior reporter who accused Zero Hedge of ‘doxing’ a Chinese scientist has reportedly left a disturbing internet footprint rife with pedophilia and rape jokes… oh, and doxing the owners of a restaurant.
Ryan Broderick, a boy-band aficionado who runs a personal tumblr blog, wrote in a Friday BuzzFeed article that Zero Hedge “has released the personal information of a scientist from Wuhan, China, falsely accusing them of creating the coronavirus as a bioweapon, in a plot it said is the real-life version of the video game Resident Evil.” (for what really happened read our response here).
After his ‘hit piece‘ was published – which included factual mistakes, no outreach to Zero Hedge, an intentional doxing of Zero Hedge, the @zerohedge Twitter account was permanently suspended for violating their ‘abuse and harassment’ policy. Shortly thereafter, Broderick updated his article, writing “Zero Hedge’s Twitter account was suspended Friday, following the publication of the scientist’s name.”
Yet, while Zero Hedge republished publicly available, professional contact information for the Wuhan scientist – Broderick openly ‘doxed’ the owners of Amy’s Baking Company in 2013, tweeting a link to the private contact information of the husband and wife owners who made headlines for a controversial episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares.” The information included their home address, phone numbers, email addresses, and a ‘dossier’ covering the couple’s marriage and financial history.
Do the right thing, @vijaya. This is nonsensical. Indefensible.
Somehow Broderick avoided a permanent Twitter suspension for ‘targeted harassment.’
Perhaps even more disturbing, however, are several posts uncovered on “Ryan Broderick’s Cool Time Fun Blog,” along with questionable tweets and other writings as documented by internet sleuths in the wake of our Twitter suspension. They include pedophilia, rape jokes, and more.
One post reads “I want to be an erotic children’s photographer. I want to be the Andy Warhol of erotic children’s photography,” followed by the hashtag #It’s not porn though
A hebephile is, according to Google, an adult who has a “strong and persistent sexual interest in pubescent-aged individuals, generally aged 11–14.”
More insight into Broderick’s predilections can be found here, here, here, here and here.
Does any of this matter? Of course not, and we are confident that Twitter will find all these outlandish public statements, doxes and tweets to be in perfectly good humor, confirming once again that when it comes to enforcing its Terms of Service, some have always been more equal than others.
As new cases of the novel coronavirus continue to emerge across East Asia as well as in Europe and North America, another pandemic with possibly more deadly implications has also swept across the globe: the revival of shockingly racist and vile sentiments targeting people of Chinese and East Asian descent in the form of false news reports and general hysteria.
On Thursday, the phenomenon took a heartbreaking turn when a Chinese man collapsed and died from a heart attack in Chinatown in Sydney, Australia. According to reports, onlookers ignored the 60-year-old man as he suffered, refusing to give him CPR and leaving him to die on the sidewalk out of fear that they would catch the coronavirus, according to the Daily Telegraph.
And while the coronavirus reportedly originated in Wuhan, China, those far removed from the outbreak are feeling the devastating impact of the aggravated racism toward Asians.
South Korean newspaper Hankyorehreports that in France, a Korean woman complained that she faced bigoted harassment multiple times thanks to the upswing in xenophobia. The newspaper reports that in a post to a South Korean online message board, the woman complained:
“An older man called me a ‘dirty Chinese [expletive].’ A guy who looked like a high schooler got in my face and told me to ‘get lost.’ I really lost it for a moment when a homeless person walking down the street even called me a [derogatory word for a woman].
Even when I explain I’m Korean, people tell me that all Asians should leave. I’d been afraid this might happen, but experiencing it personally has shown me how hard it is to bear such hatred. It makes me afraid to go to crowded places.”
Meanwhile, on France’s BFM TV, an Asian-descended French person complained:
“When I was coming out of a sports stadium in downtown Paris, a boy made fun of me by shouting, ‘Here comes the coronavirus.’”
The complaints come amid an outcry over a headline published last week in local newspaper Courrier Picard that read “Alerte jaune” (Yellow alert) and “Le péril jaune?” (Yellow peril?) alongside an image of a Chinese woman in a protective mask, harkening back to a racist early 20th-century concept of the so-called “Yellow Peril” pitting the so-called “civilized” white, Western world against the alleged “threat” posed by the peoples of the “orient,” or eastern Asia.
The alarming rise in overt racist abuse across public transportation and social media in France has led to many Asians taking to social media using the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus—or “I’m not a virus.”
From Toronto to even as far as San Diego, Chinese-owned businesses have been sharply impacted. Even across Latin America, seemingly harmless memes about catching the coronavirus from Asian retailers like Chinese variety store Miniso or Korean counterpart Kumuso reflect the irrationality that has gripped the masses.
Every asians are not chinese, every chinese people isn’t affected by the virus you fucking racists #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus
And while many scientists believe that there is a nexus between the coronavirus and animals, with many of those infected having worked in or shopped at a large meat market in Wuhan, a number of uneducated assertions and racist jokes have conflated the diets of Asians and Chinese with the outbreak.
In one clip posted to Twitter by the anonymous user @FreeMindHK, an Asian man can be seen eating live baby mice along with the caption:
“Chinese ‘delicacy,’ probably one of the causes for [the] emergence of #WuhanCoronavirus Source: telegram.”
However, Chinese social media users, including one who claims to reside in Wuhan, deny that live mice is a so-called “delicacy” and have also pointed out that there is nothing in the video that identifies the man as Chinese.
In my Chinese moms chat group, we discussed how to brace ourselves and the kids for the inevitable wave of racism coming our way as this unfolds.
Many of us have never even been to China but know we will not go unscathed. https://t.co/hz7YCPjyb5
As James Palmer wrote in a widely-shared article for Foreign Policy magazine, while many Chinese people have a taste for dishes that seem abhorrent in the West—including exotic and wild animals believed to have medicinal properties, which the government has attempted to clamp down on in recent years—such tastes are hardly the norm. Indeed, as Palmer notes, many inside China joke about the Cantonese dietary habits of eating “everything with four legs save the table and everything that flies but the airplane.”
Regardless, social media users—including commenters on posts by the Mind Unleashed—have been quick to point to groundless rumors, anecdotes, and social media posts to revive decades-old racist tropes about the “bizarre” and “disgusting” diets of Asian and Chinese people, or their supposedly “uncivilized,” “un–evolved,” and “horrible” culture.
Dear the people of China,
Please stop eating bat soup, koalas and hamsters. It’s making us all ill.
But while scientists are still struggling to find a cure for the coronavirus, there is an obvious cure to the shocking revival of anti-Asian discrimination across the West.
This is why people don’t take you seriously. “I, as American, don’t eat bats, therefore everyone else who does should stop because I, as an American, dictate the culinary culture of all of the planet.” Your self centered vantage point is myopic and immature.
Whenever we see inaccurate stories or see racist tropes being trotted out in response to the virus, we should call this out for what it is: blind bigotry and ignorance that can result in tragedy for completely innocent people of Asian descent—including our friends, neighbors, and family members.
China Bans Selling, Plans Massive Liquidity Injection To Prevent Market Crash
Judging by the collapse in Chinese futures and the Offshore Yuan over the past week, China’s key cash equity index – The Shanghai Composite – is set to plunge around 6-8% as the market re-opens for the first time since Lunar New Year (and the coronavorus chaos).
China stock futures have tumbled…
Source: Bloomberg
And Offshore Yuan is fighting at the 7.00/USD level…
Source: Bloomberg
Which of course will not do for the nation has to maintain the appearance of a minor flesh-wound than a catastrophic coronary. And so, as Bloomberg reports, China unveiled a raft of measures over the weekend to aid companies hit by the coronavirus outbreak and also shore up financial markets.
Quarantative easing?
The People’s Bank of China announced that the total injection announced was 1.2 trillion yuan, the largest single-day addition of its kind in data going back to 2004.
The money will be supplied using reverse repurchase agreements to ensure liquidity is “reasonably ample” during the outbreak, according to the PBOC.
The new measures follow the announcement last week that China’s biggest banks will lower interest rates for firms in Hubei, the center of the outbreak.
However, as Tommy Xie, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp notes, the net effect of this admittedly huge liquidity injection is much lower as there are more than 1 trillion yuan of short-term funds scheduled to mature on Monday.
“The amount of the net injection isn’t huge. The PBOC may want to retain some flexibility, which means it can add more liquidity in the rest of the week if the sentiment is too bad.”
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, we wonder if even this additional liquidity injection will be big enough as judging by Dr.Copper, the Chinese economy is about to be hit by the biggest shock in recent history…
Source: Bloomberg
And China’s credit impulse – the lifeline of its economic growth – is barely positive and rolling over…
Source: Bloomberg
In addition to the concrete measures, Bloomberg notes that senior officials from various regulators and the central bank put out statements urging brokerages and funds to guide investors to “rationally and objectively” evaluate the impact of the epidemic, calling it “short-term and temporary.”
Financial regulators said they have “full confidence” they can keep the economy stable in the long term, according to the Saturday statement, which urged investors not to be affected by “irrational sentiment.”
We are not quite sure what they mean by “irrational sentiment,” as it seems entirely rational to expect economic growth to slow and earnings to be pressured lower given the nation is practically on total lockdown for the foreseeable future.
And if you think that is just conjecture, here is a local business owner with the truth on the ground…
CEO of restaurant chain 西贝 says he can only pay salaries for 3 more months before his cash runs out. Calls for relief from stupid govt policy (傻政策）otherwise will have to layoff workers and create social unrest. 100k views before blocked on wechat https://t.co/gkmIvVV8ha
Said back during SARS it was easier to cope since they didn’t have to pay salaries. Now labor makes up 30% of their costs vs just 15% in 2003 and firms have to keep paying.
Says that cutting interest rates is a drop in the bucket, instead wants the government to write off 2020 taxes and take up some of slack when paying salaries
1.2 trillion yuan is nothing like enough…and they have a plan for that – ban selling!
Notice about stock market in #China. No one is allowed to sell when the market resume on Feb. 3. Biding price to be controlled before opening, no net sell before Feb. 7. Needs special permission for sales over 10M yuan. #CCP fearing market crash #Coronavirus#CoronavirusOutbreakpic.twitter.com/lnGIdQJCe2
And 21st Century Herald confirms that China’s securities regulator CSRC has reportedly notified brokerages to suspend short selling of stocks from Feb 3…
#China‘s securities regulator CSRC has reportedly notified brokerages to suspend short selling of stocks from Feb 3, according to the 21st Century Business Herald.
