China’s Price Controls Won’t Crash a Booming Metals Market
David Fickling, 17 June 2021
China’s government is on a campaign to rein in prices for industrial metals. If it wants the plan to work, it needs to address the cause, not the symptoms.
State-owned companies have been ordered to control their risks and limit exposure to overseas commodities markets, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News this week. Government stockpiles of copper, aluminum and zinc will also soon be released to fabricators and manufacturers, a measure that could be expected to reduce prices. Continue reading “Article: China’s Price Controls Won’t Crash a Booming Metals Market”
Police have seized over $70 million – mostly cash – linked to an international pyramid scheme in China and Canada.
Outside of perhaps China, right now the big use case for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) seems to be just talking about them. Crypto is cool right now and people are interested in digital money, so government and central bank officials are also spending a lot of time talking about their visions of how fiat currencies could be brought into this new realm.
Beijing has been engaged in a battle for public opinion for several years, aggressively promoting a positive vision of China to counter criticisms for its involvement in human rights violations, intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, its engagement with Taiwan and the South China Sea disputes, and its suspected involvement in the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2017, senior Party leaders acknowledged that “the main battlefield for public opinion” occurs on the extensive borderless Internet where people receive their news, express their thoughts, and promote and argue their political and ideological viewpoints. Beijing understands how the Internet is essential in disseminating China-friendly narratives, while at the same time deflecting criticisms and reassigning blame. In essence, it is how Beijing seeks to preserve its image while tarnishing those of others. 
The central bank of South Korea (BOK) announced this week the launch of a second specialist team to supposedly develop a digital currency central bank (CBDC) a year after dissolving their first group of researchers.
As the cryptocurrency market’s weeks-long rout continues, Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday afternoon to refute claims that he engaged in a bitcoin pump-and-dump scheme earlier this year and said the electric-vehicle company would once again invest in the world’s largest cryptocurrency once its mining operations constitute a “reasonable” amount of clean energy usage. 
Last year, during the peak of the global pandemic, the world created more than seven hundred new billionaires. In the year since, another five hundred have been created — but the total wealth on the Forbes list has increased from $5 trillion to $13 trillion, the largest increase ever recorded in any one-year period. China topped the list for the highest number of new billionaires, with the United States coming in second.
After weeks of drift and doubt, Wall Street was looking for a decisive signal on price growth to help put the reflation trade back on track. Instead it got another mixed message.
Hong Kong is to test connecting China’s digital yuan with its domestic payments network, officials said on Tuesday, the second stage of trials of China’s digital currency in the financial hub.
A committee of lawmakers in the Bundestag has published its inquiry into the Wirecard fraud affair. The damaging report comes months before Germany’s general election.
China is planning to beef up its law against money laundering with higher fines and a broader scope, according to a draft revision that would be the first update to the law in more than 14 years.
Amid an exponential increase in online fraud, an INTERPOL-coordinated operation codenamed HAECHI-I mobilized more than 40 specialized law enforcement officers across the Asia Pacific region. Over six months of coordinated intelligence collection and joint operations, police were able to intercept a total of $83 million in illicit funds transferred from victims to the perpetrators of cyber-enabled financial crime.
Why does the US advocate a free market while stifling it too? The current US-China economic war is a perfect example of this perplexing question. The legacy of Milton Friedman, the founder of America’s modern political economy, was a representation of this very dichotomy: the use and manipulation of the concept of the free market.