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rffrydr
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 Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 9:29 pm Post subject: The Olympics |
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The Summer Olympics in Beijing are scheduled to open on 8/8/08 at 8:08:08 p.m
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 11:43 am Post subject: |
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The usual hangover of the Olympics game, with the "Bird's Nest" now labeled as a white elephant:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-china-birds-nest15-2010feb15,0,550814.story
| Quote: | Next door, the Water Cube, officially known as the National Aquatics Center, is also losing a bit of face. The bubble-wrapped wonder is being transformed into a water park. But unlike the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube has been in constant use since the Olympics and is popular for its public pool, with a $7 entry fee.
The Bird's Nest is expensive. Tickets to the snow park are $26. Then visitors use a swipe card to rack up charges for rentals, games and food. They pay at the end.
"I don't know how much we've paid today. It could be as much as my month's salary," said Xiaolong's father, Ma Tianjun.
Ma, who drove an hour to get to the park, said he realized too late how expensive it would be. "Once you board the thieves' ship, you can only go forward," he said, using an old Beijing saying.
"This is a place for rich people, not poor people like us," said Ma. "We won't be coming back." |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 3:31 pm Post subject: |
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Economist comes down firmly for china:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15270708
As usual there is a lot of per-capita thinking--except for RE. Here they quote local thinking about a better class of person making the, unleveraged, purchase. BTW much of this "cash on barrel-head" talk, while supportive in general, and though may have saved Hong Kong '97, is also leveraged borrowed money. As the BBC documentary underscores, the money comes from the extended family, and in the country, the village.
Japan again seems to be the model for everything bad. Although it does show what asian virtues can wrought. Demographics, irony of ironies, may be one to look at however.
We will again make a test of "face."
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2010 10:43 am Post subject: |
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I'm going to stick with the idea that this moment was "the moment": we don't have to worry about picking a "china top" because it's already happened.
This last month China slammed shut the window allowing capital investment flows outside its borders. And the greatest company of them all, The GOOG, turned it's back on the place (yes, for real). So closes another "great going out" in this forever inward looking place.
I'm gonna really stick my neck out and say there was no greater fusion of The Command Economy and its populace than what occurred in the long march to the "Chinese Century" --08.08.08. The rest is just catch-up. Whether or not you can, or did, make money off this is another question 
The "price"--as measured on the native china shares so far confirms that idea, with an extended top going through the Olympic summer. The huge currency adjustment dividend paid out on the CAF at '08 year's-end will not be repeated. The renminbi will rise, but only a shadow of it '08 expectations. And the long promised "chinese consumer" will be the '08 current chinese consumer--large but not earth-shaking..
Though it is said that it can't be done I'm none too proud to say I did it--with due deference to the Marketthoughts line:
| Quote: | By definition, there can only be one point in time (as represented by a trading day and at most a couple of trading weeks, although they do not need to be consecutive) when the market peaks. Coming off a (typically) long bull market, that means one is making a very low-probability bet. For example, there are about 252 trading days in a year. Even if you know that the Chinese real estate or stock market will make a major peak sometime in 2010, the odds of one calling and catching the peak is 0.4% (if one calls it to the day), and 4% if one manages to catch any point in time during the two trading weeks that encompass the peak. Since the market typically makes a parabolic move towards the end of a bull market, anything outside the two-week timeframe is impractical from a trading/money-making standpoint.
In addition, calling the top of a bull market and making a bet against it doesn't mean that one has the staying power to take advantage of the full downdraft. Plenty of bears who shorted great bull markets at the peak – such as Jesse Livermore – covered or reversed their positions prematurely, much to their detriment. Some bears even overstayed, as many hedge fund managers have found out to their dismay over the last ten months. Jan 2010 |
Yes, I had the invigorating experience of shorting PetroChina, US Steel, and Potash at "exactly" the top--if you were to look back years hence using monthly charts.
And yes, I would have been margined out of the positions, and potentially ruined, had I not used options and, primarily, options spreads. Parabolas strike fear in hearts of men. And because I did, and lived to tell the tale, I also left the greatest gains on the table. Indeed, I've easily done better selling mundane SP straddles at mundane times--but the profit, when it came, was short and sweet. But I never pressed the bet; the market having already destroyed my confidence in the prediction. Certainly no way to "manage" money. Warren meanwhile was doing the same--but different. Unheard of, he was selling--what he already bought. You don't need to guess who did better in the end. We'll take another shot at him with "Beyond Your Dreams." --Yet, either you're a trader or you're not. And bubbles, at some level have to be managed.
The magic and lucky 8pct growth in GDP, what China needs to "stand still", is just all too "lucky" for my taste. Yes they are king of the hill now and seemed to have left us in the dust. But we promised 2 trillion in stimulus and delivered maybe 500-billion over two years depending how you want to count the unspent bank capital. China did it on the press of a button [edit: last year’s record 9.59 trillion yuan in bank lending]. Steel was funded to build steel output, concrete to fund concrete and so on.
China will remain the "world's factory" but the savings culture gripping the West and the "buy local" and energy conservatism and protectionism that goes with it will put a lid on things. And that's just where things stand to say nothing of the promise of where things were set to go. China will no doubt be a part of all our growth technologies in alternative energy infrastructure, medicine, tech etc. They will continue to be part of everything we do. But we will now do without. And that will count more in terms of china investment.
The chinese consumer is real but will never be realized. Per-capita comparisons will get you very little in evaluating china; much more in mis-direction. Life is cheap in in this land of a billion people piled up on each other on the coasts. It's still not uncommon to see the elderly lying dead where they stood in the streets outside the major cities. The "safety-net" will be no better than the "iron rice bowl" of old and the Confucian ideal will continue to tie incomes to healthcare both real and imagined. Meanwhile the "grand plan" united by Olympic dreams will gradually come undone. We forget that chinese is not one, but two, languages--and that's just where you begin. From there follow the food.
The irony of it all is that China is already a global power--and a colonial one at that. The Mercantile system it enjoys will fade just as it did with the british.
| Quote: | | Finally, a major bull market only dies of exhaustion – which means that at the top of the market, all the investable capital is sucked up by said market and almost every major bear would have covered their short positions (such as Julian Robertson's Tiger Fund in March 2000) before the market can go down. Jan, 2010 |
I would say even "exhaustion" is too late for the trader. A bull market, like any great force, dies when there is nothing left for it to organize. as such, yes, all the investable captial is sucked up and bears are running back up their trees. So if bubbles can't help even the fleetfooted trader who need them?
That is a question for our times. 
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 8:40 pm Post subject: |
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The hollowed shell remains:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/olympics/other/la-fg-beijing-bust22-2009feb22,0,7597713.story
| Quote: | What makes this boom-and-bust cycle different from those in the West is that there is no private ownership of land in China, making local governments de facto partners in the real estate industry, which earn huge fees from leasing and transferring land.
Huang Yasheng, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traces the blame for the bust to the Chinese Communist Party and its reluctance to allow a true market economy.
"The lack of land reform fed into the real estate bubble and now it's coming back to haunt them," said Huang, author of "Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics," published last year. "There should have been more checks and balances on the ability of the government to acquire land." |
Heaven or bust:
http://www.latimes.com/sports/olympics/la-fg-luxury22-2009feb22,0,2112222.story
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2008 8:50 pm Post subject: |
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So far so good...bad:
URL link
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 6:49 am Post subject: |
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/filmmore/pt_3.html
Narrator: The world looked at Chicago with fear and wonder - and saw the future.
Narrator: The fair was a smashing success. New York's Harper's Weekly called it "the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War." It drew 27 million people, 14 million from abroad, the greatest tourist attraction in American history. On October 28, two days before the fair closed, Carter Harrison welcomed America's mayors to The White City. "When the fire swept over our city and laid it in ashes," he boasted, "the world said: 'Chicago and its boasting is now gone forever,' but Chicago said, 'We will rebuild the city better than ever,' and Chicago has done it." "Two years ago this thousand acres covered by these palaces...was the home of the muskrat. Look at it now! " He invited the mayors to "come out of this White City...into our black city. Then he went home. To be summoned to his door a few hours later. Summoned by a half-mad illiterate rejected for work at City Hall.Harrison's funeral was the most impressive in the young city's history. Two hundred thousand mourners paid their respects in City Hall. The procession to Graceland Cemetery was led by Chicago's titans of industry. Next came the aldermen and then Harrison's supporters - Irish, German, Polish, Bohemian, Italian, Greek, policemen, union leaders and socialists.
Miller: It's an imaging thing. The fair is an imaging thing. Chicago hated this image of the black city, the city of smoke, soot, dirt, pollution, and gambling houses, and whatever. So the idea is, you bring them into the first class hotels. And Olmsted set this up beautifully. They would take excursion boats from downtown and sweep across the magnificent skyline and land at the fair, and take a moveable sidewalk and go into the Court of Honor, and here's the new Chicago. It provided just the things that- to settle, I think, the nerve a little bit after Haymarket.
Narrator: This utopian world was reflected by the fair's official photography. All is orderly; the weather, perfect; people, lifeless.
Harris: They presented pictures of these European-like boulevards, canals with gondolas and gondoliers, escorting elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen. It was presented as an upper middle class festival. Safe, clean, lots of music, lots of art.
Narrator: It was a utopian vision. A city with broad streets shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings. Statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings were of unparalleled grandeur. Everyone had work. There were no strikes. No anarchy. And - no freedom. Workers were regimented like an army. Boston novelist Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward in 1887, a year after Haymarket. His utopian city was an uncanny foreshadowing of the fantasy city Chicago would create for its World's Fair six years later.
Duis: The fair is America's window into the future. Fairs generally function as this. It is a place where people put out outlandish ideas which can in a sense be trial balloons as to whether or not they're going to work in society as a whole. One of the most important for the Colombian Exposition was the many uses of electricity. You have an all-electric kitchen, you have electric lighting, electric elevators, electricity doing almost every kind of job in the factory or in the home. That's a very advanced idea for a lot of people.
Narrator: The next July a reporter looked up the tracks and witnessed another dark moment for the Black City. A strike at Pullman had led to a national railway strike. When this sidelined trains carrying the US mail, President Cleveland dispatched federal troops. Thirty-four people died in Chicago's bloodiest labor uprising. A Presidential commission was critical of George Pullman. In the terrible depression of 1893 he had slashed wages but not rents. Some paychecks were as little as 12 cents. He guaranteed his stockholders an 8% return.
Brown: Even the U.S. commissioners, suggested that he wasn't really playing by the rules of open capitalism, which claimed that the reason that investors were supposed to get a profit is because they took a risk
Narrator: Renowned the world over as a symbol of social responsibility, the town of Pullman was considered by the Illinois Supreme Court an agent of social control. The court forced the company to divest it, and Pullman was absorbed by Chicago. An elusive utopia became an ordinary industrial town. Within a generation, The Florence Hotel, named after Pullman's beloved daughter, was a xxx house. George Pullman's Corinthian column in Graceland Cemetery is remarkable for its beauty - and its weight. When he died brokenhearted in 1897, his casket was enshrouded in tons of reinforced cement to prevent desecration by labor activists. George Pullman had tried to speak to Chicago's labor problem, the big issue of the age, through social engineering - and failed.
Narrator: The winter after the fair closed, arsonists burned the remains of a decaying White City. It seemed to symbolize the illusion of the urban ideal.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 9:50 am Post subject: |
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The Republican forcefed, and Democratic embraced, "Constructive Engagement" can now be put to rest. Of the two grudgingly designated protest zones no permits were issued. Looks like we all need a trip to the re-education camps:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/sports/olympics/21protest.html?_r=1&scp=30&sq=where%20olympics&st=cse&oref=slogin
"Black cat, white cat...so long at it catches mice." EEM investors across the world, too young to know a world preglobalization, are beginning to come to terms with the idea of ecomomic consequences of politics. --As much so right here in the US of A.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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The GK take:
| Code: | The Beijing Olympics exceeded even the highest expectations. For the domestic audience, the event showed
that China now meets the world’s most powerful countries on equal footing. The nation’s athletes added an
exclamation point by winning an even century of medals, and 15 more golds than the United States. As for
the view from outside, issues that loomed large in the run-up to the games — pollution and human rights —
dropped from sight once the games began and focus shifted to the caliber of the athletics (which was
uniformly high), the quality of venues and the excellence of organization. The main downside was a lack of
the party atmosphere that usually takes over an Olympic city. Here’s the detailed report card:
Organization: A
We surveyed several Olympics veterans, each with experience of 5-10 Games, and their verdict was swift
and unanimous: this was the best-organized Olympics ever. There was not a single meaningful snafu. No
delayed events, sub-par facilities or logistical choke-points. New subway lines operated flawlessly, and
legions of chirpy volunteers kept the mood cheerful and pedestrian traffic flowing. Security lines were long
but moved swiftly. Had concession stands at the venues sold anything edible, the grade would have been
A+. |
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HenryTo
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 10:01 am Post subject: |
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Too much "stability" for business around the Games?
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11920899
"Pause to Refresh" is the mindset. After waiting through the 50% market breakdown, RE breakdown, export breakdown..."The China Story" breakdown will come very very late and will leave many many questions -- "foresight" first among them.
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