trading recap

Week-in-Review: Mon: China to audit gov’t debt levels, China June industrial profits +6.3% yoy (May +15.5%), Japan retail sales -0.2% (+0.8% exp), Der Spiegel says German banks face new write-offs, US pending hm sales -0.4% (+9.1% yoy), Dallas fed survey soft, S&P -0.3%; Tue: PBOC repo cash injection (1st in 5mths), Japan June IP -4.8% yoy, RBA Stevens very dovish (bldg. approvals plunge), German consumer conf ju

What a f’in train wreck. And like all tragedies, soon after you bury the broken bodies, bloodhounds first unearth incompetence. Then corruption. Kickbacks. Capital misallocation. It shouldn’t take long to pick up a scent. Spain has Earth’s second longest high-speed network; behind China. They got more lines under construction than all of Europe combined. Of course they also have the world’s lowest ratio of passengers

Premier Li made a promise. To offer markets “stable predictability.” Naturally, China’s dictators love stability. Predictability. After all, they’re human. And want what they can’t have. Anyhow, housing prices rose in 69 of 70 Chinese cities, threatening social stability. No surprise. You see, there aren’t enough women in China. And the best way to attract one is to have a couple condo keys bulging in your blue jeans

Ben sat in stall six. Biting his nails. Waiting his turn. You see, he was last in line. Of course Snowden went first. Walked out, bedhead, scruffy. Seated between two lovely angels, from Amnesty International, fallen to earth to fight for the persecuted. Anyhow, they soothed poor, brave Edward, his life in ruins. Ruined. Puzzled to discover that not enough Americans care for his cause. So the angels promised him iron

Pass me another Bud bro, can’t pull myself away, can you believe this show? Of course, it’s heart-warming to have Egyptians celebrate our glorious revolution with one of their own. Fireworks lighting the air. Crowds filling Tahir. But lost in the wide-angle lenses were nuances. Like images of 91 starry-eyed revolutionary sisters, dragged into darkness, surrounding the square, ganged raped by hundreds of their Egyptia

“Big money organizes itself somewhat like feral hogs,” announced my favorite Federal Reserve President, from Dallas. “If they detect a weakness or a bad scent, they’ll go after it,” continued Richard Fisher. “I don’t want to go from Wild Turkey to cold turkey overnight,” he drawled, sending us boars off the scent laid by the Princeton Professor’s sterile taper-talk. But Fisher was just revvin’ up his redneck rhetoric

Beijing sparked it up just in time, 2yrs ahead of schedule, leapfrogging America. The Tianhe-2 supercomputer (Milky Way 2 for those of you without children learning Mandarin) runs at 54.9 petaflops (54,900trln calculations/second for those of you without Mandarin children). The massive military machine runs on 3.12mm Intel chips, which we apparently redesign too quickly to copy. So the first thing they asked Tianhe-2

Wanna catch a fish? Don’t cast in the desert. Wanna bag a bad guy? Don’t listen to phone calls. Nope. Look for the dude without one. A phone that is. Don’t believe me? Go ask bin Laden. So what’s this fuss about then? Well, nothing’s ever as it seems. They say Snowden’s a traitor. For saying 4=2+2. For calling the sky blue. That he’s probably hiding in Hong Kong, but they’re unsure. ’Cause he ditched his phone. Natur

My name is Eric Peters. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a looter. And I’m evil. So says Turkey’s Prime Minister. You see, in Erdogan’s book, all drinkers are alcoholics. All protesters are looters. And tweeters, well, us tweeters are evil. Anyhow, thank god Turkey has lots. It’d be a dry, dark, dense nation without ’em. Ankara’s politicians and media moguls spooned in bed, censoring riot reports, while broadcasting inane docum