Nearly two years ago now I wrote here about Country Garden, a Chinese property development company, which had just then (October 2023) defaulted on its bonds, which I noted was "one of the manifestations of a sudden slowdown in China's property sector" which had for years until then been one of the PRC's key sources of wealth creation. Country Garden and its cooperating creditors have been struggling ever since to turn it around, making it once again a viable concern (not a "zombie" company). This month, there has been progress. Country Garden announced an agreement with a core group of banks that together hold 49 percent of its offshore debt. Its restructuring plan requires it to slash its offshore debt burden by 78%, so this agreement could be a key step. In February 2024, Ever Credit, a wholly owned unit of Kingboard Holdings of Hong Kong, filed a winding-up petition against Country Garden effectively demanding a liquidation. The demanded liquidation st...
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I now take another look, perhaps our last look, at Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Once again, I will focus on a specific passage. This time, that passage arises in the book's chapter six. In the ongoing story, it occurs when SBF is finally creating a crypto exchange, in Hong Kong in the go-go climate of early 2019. [It didn't move much of its operation o the Bahamas until September 2020.] Lewis is talking about the difference between the crypto religionists on the one hand and the "suits" from traditional financial institutions, coming into crypto as colonizers, on the other. The higher crypto prices rose, the greater the flood into crypto of sober-minded people in suits that people like Zane [a religionist] found insufferable. ... The Goldman guys and the venture capitalists and the corporate lawyers turned crypto bros -- they were all part of this invasion of conventional people who wanted to make fast money without the kookiness that had made ...
Two points today. First, a lot of the wealth of Greater China is about to experience a generational turnover. Greater China is defined for this purpose as the People's Republic, including the special administrative district of Hong Kong, AND the Republic of China, aka Taiwan. Trillions are about to change hands as a critical cohort of old guys dies off and leaves their world to their heir. Second, IMHO, the People's Republic is not about to attack Taiwan. There is a fair amount of saber rattling right now, but the PRC sees its way to becoming a great regional hegemon and that way may be a lot clearer if it is seen as a force for order in the region. The relevant region is just about everything south of the old Soviet Union and north of the equator, stretching from Ethiopia to Indonesia. The People's Republic wants peace with the other China so Greater China as a single entity can become the hegemon in that vast region. A third point, subsuming each of the first...
Today and tomorrow I will present a timeline of the last 38 years. Just one event per year. With little organization. Just think of this as a lot of stuff that happened. If we try to think of them as the "most important events" of their respective years, some of the choices will seem a tad eccentric. 1984, The Sino-British Joint Declaration sets out plans for a transition of Hong Kong to PRC sovereignty. 1985, Microsoft releases Window 1.0 1986, The launch of the Fox Broadcasting Co. 1987. The US FDA approves the marketing of Prozac. 1988. This was the year of the peak of the insider trading scandal that made Rudolph Giuliani a person of importance. Drexel Burnham pleaded guilty this year. 1989. This was the year of the SATANIC VERSES controversy involving the Ayatollah Khomeini and Salman Rushdie. 1990. East and West Germany re-unite after decades of separation. 1991. The Soviet Union dissolves itself. 1992. The European Union comes into being, as a stronger an...
I'm writing today simple to express my awe about the courage of so many of the people of the city of Hong Kong, in regard especially to their resistance to the extradition bill that their Overlords attempted to force upon them. I'll do so with three Reuters links. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-extradition/hong-kong-vows-to-press-ahead-with-extradition-bill-despite-huge-protest-idUSKCN1TB08W They paralyzed a financial hub, not something that Beijing can ignore. They risked a Tiananmen-type event in hopes of winning a great victory for liberty. The treaty secured before Britain's withdrawal allowed the people of Hong Kong the continued benefits of a British style legal system. Those benefits will surely be lost as it becomes easier for Beijing to drage citizens of the supposedly autonomous region into the mainland and try them there. https://www.reuters.tv/v/PQi0/2019/06/12/hong-kong-s-financial-hub-paralyzed-by-protests Over time, Beijing may y...
By "alpha seekers" for the purposes of this list I mean the managers of funds that invest actively in a range of markets, and that work to do better than average (by various benchmarks). This is a list of big stories of the year ending from their point of view, and it differs from a more general list of financial/economic top stories, which I will present tomorrow. This, 2016, has been an eventful year for seekers of alpha, their counterparties, and their service providers. For example, the Federal Trade Commission cut a deal with Herbalife this year, disappointing those seekers of alpha who had hoped the FTC would crack down on it as a pyramid scheme. A short side analyst for Macquarie was rather dramatically excluded from a Pax Global earnings briefing, laying bare some of the tensions in the financial community in Hong Kong. And "reverse carry" seemed to rise to prominence in the world of foreign exchange. But in my quite arbitrary and selective count, none...
To: David Roberts I appreciate your recent two pieces on Vox concerning "rich jerks," which led you to a discussion of philosophical ethics, especially deontology versus teleology. Allow me to add my own thoughts. At the bottom, I'll say a few words about sources but, for now, I'll ignore my sources to allow for a conversational flow akin to your own. In meta-ethical terms, if I understand you, you seem to identify jerkiness with deontology, so non-jerkiness requires teleology. The classic example of means-regardless-of-ends deontology is of our alleged obligation to tell the truth even to a murderer about a potential victim in hiding. That particular example of supposed goodness would certainly seem jerky to the sorry fellow in hiding. You also seem to identify teleology (non-jerkiness) with utilitarianism. Of course there is nothing inevitable about that. I'd like to bend your ear on that point for a few minutes. The gist of my pers...