Archive for 2007
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
...many people have been asking since its investment in Blackstone last June (though possibly not in Old English cant). Now for the answer: All snuggly with Morgan Stanley, it seems.
The late-Wednesday announcement of CIC's purchase of a 9.9% stake in Morgan Stanley is the first global move made by the ...
Posted in Gwynn Guilford, cib | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
In a display of some of the weird promotions that go on inside a vast bureaucracy, Yang Songliang, the publisher of China Economic Heard, was recently promoted to the head of the new national oil reserve.
I think this type of management makes complete sense, and will be waiting by the ...
Posted in Bradley Gardner | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
Two news stories that seem somewhat telling about the state of China's banking industry:
First, Shenzhen Development bank is hoping to raise RMB 4.2 billion through a share sale, to deal with "chronic capital shortage," it's planning on selling 120 million shares to Baosteel, hoping to bring its capital adequacy up ...
Posted in Finance, Bradley Gardner | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Here's a link to an amusing and China-relevant (amusing in its China-relevance, really) blog post titled How to Negotiate Like an Indian. Here's an excerpt below (the excerpt is followed in the post by a list of tips.)
In India, every transaction — EVERY transaction — is negotiated. Merchandise, cab fare, ...
Posted in India, Eveline Chao, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
Somewhat on the fly (we're in production for January's issue), apparently the Australian Treasury has discovered that vague wording is a powerful tool in blustering about a new Asian menace: the sovereign wealth fund. Behold: "Attempts by foreign interests to purchase controlling stakes in strategic industries or iconic domestic companies ...
Posted in Gwynn Guilford | No Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Michael Pettis has a nice piece on the US - China meetings, which I wrote about yesterday.
Yesterday I mentioned that Jim Rogers had essentially blamed the drop of the dollar on Bernanke vastly increasing dollar supply so as to stop the general downward trend of the American economy. Pettis though ...
Posted in RMB, America, economy, Bradley Gardner | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
So the Americans are in town, full of their usual "let the RMB appreciate" bravado. Chen Deming, the Chinese Vice-Minister of Commerce, managed to bitch slap them though.
"(The yuan) is not the key issue. Currently my focus is more on the depreciation of the US dollar and its possible impact ...
Posted in RMB, America, economy, Bradley Gardner | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Wow. My friend Yam Ki just alerted me to this article in the New York Times. Basically, the World Bank's measure of the purchasing power parity rate in China was based on numbers from the 1980s. This year those numbers got updated and, hey, it turns out that the Chinese ...
Posted in Eveline Chao, economy | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
There was an amusing article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that pointed out that nearly all older, prominent Chinese men seem to dye their hair black. The article also touched, very briefly, on what I thought was one interesting (although not entirely convincing) reason why:
Experts say that obsessing about ...
Posted in trends, Consumer, Eveline Chao, cib | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Anyone who’s ever travelled with a Chinese tour group knows the drill: the coach pulls up at some ungodly hour of the morning. You stumble on board and doze off, hoping that when you wake up you will have been magically transported to the Terracotta Warriors, or the Great Wall, ...
Posted in trends, Consumer, Matthew Plowright | No Comments »
