Happy New Year!
It’s going to be a slow trading day most likely. Europe has been trending down all morning (7am) with no one wanting to be bullish into early closes and it looks like we’re down about 1% over there for the day. Over in Asia, the Nikkei was closed and had also finished the week with a 1% drop while the Hang Seng finished their half-day flat at 23,035, up 5% for the year while the Shanghai rallied 1.8% on no volume but it wasn’t enough to save them from closing the year out down almost 14% – kind of odd since the “China growth story” is the main driver for the US equity premise.
The Shanghai gauge’s advance for a third day narrowed its decline for the year to 14 percent, the worst performer among the 14 biggest world benchmark indexes, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It’s the biggest drop since 2008, when the global financial crisis crimped the nation’s exports. The index jumped 80 percent in 2009 as a 4 trillion-yuan stimulus package and record new lending helped the Asian economy recover. Whether another 4Tn Yuan is waiting in the wings in 2011 remains to be seen. “The previous declines were excessive and the market is performing a technical rebound,” said Wu Kan, a fund manager at Dazhong Insurance Co. which oversees $285 million. “It’s a short-term correction amid weak market sentiment.”
We won’t get into that because I don’t want to be negative today. I’m not even going to say anything negative about Pimpco’s BS $92M fine for using their $1.2 Trillion Dollar fund to manipulate the Treasury markets because, like GE selling key US technology to China, which we discussed yesterday – no one seems to care so why should I? China can buy our aviation technology to build planes that may eventually put BA’s 150,000 workers onto the unemployment lines but we can’t buy property in China as China Daily reports that the nation’s housing ministry will work together with the Ministry of Commerce and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange to monitor overseas capital inflows into the property market.
Joel Kotkin makes a good point in Forbes today about what he calls “The Poverty of Ambition” in which he also suggests the need for Westerners to cheer up and try to…
