The news is ‘in’, so to speak – the US economy was down in August and actually was less than every single prediction provided by professionally accredited Bloomberg contributors. And Hong Kong’s was far worse – ‘yugely worse’, to paraphrase an American cheese-coloured hair ‘friend’ (sic) of mine. At least, though, Hong Kong’s leader-in-public today made history by doing the … Read More
Whoosh
No, please don’t think that I’m in any way doing an infringement on Nike (FYI, they use Swoosh)…this is WHOOSH ie. the sound the toilet makes when you’re flushing. Ever since Mike prevailed upon me to write the ‘occasional’ column, it has morphed into a regular (almost) weekly dealio – I’m not complaining but just saying that, in the beginning, … Read More
Lost in Translation
Is it me or has the world gone totally off on a tangent? When I was a child, leaders were supposed to be these erudite, polished statesmen who seemed to have learned (most of the time) from the example of WW II that discussion and consensus were far more likely to achieve positive outcomes for all concerned. But now it … Read More
Truth, Sanity & Reason
It has been an interesting week. The Donald labelled China, “a currency manipulator”. Leaving aside the fact that every single country ‘manipulates’ (sic) its currency to some degree, overtly and/or covertly, China has been adroitly and expensively (to it) manipulating its currency to maintain its level to NOT FALL. So they showed Donald and withdrew a degree of support…in 2 … Read More
The People Are Singing But is Anyone Listening?
So, at long last, Boris Johnson is now, as Ivanka Trump put it so cogently, Prime Minister of The United Kingston. Notwithstanding his previous adamantly categorical assurances of a No-Deal Brexit being “one in a million”, he has less than 100 days to get a deal done and his demands that the EU reopen its previous agreement and that the … Read More
Let’s Be Careful Out There
So I’m taking a break and decided to write the column today…I’m in the process of negotiating a reasonably complex deal between someone in Malaysia who wants to sell wood, someone in China who can cure and prepare it, someone in Pakistan who will do the final manufacturing, and someone in the USA who wants to buy the finished product … Read More
Flakier Fake News
President Erdogan of Turkey – oh, hell, let’s call him Emperor…I mean the guy just moved into a new 1000 room (no, I am not making it up) ‘office’ so shouldn’t he have a title commensurate with the building? All right, then, if you insist, we’ll call him King….anyway, he’s gone through with the purchase of the Russian missiles and … Read More
It Ain’t A Pretty Picture
I sat down to write what I thought would be a simple column but how this stuff adds up….it accumulates faster than Kangde Xin Composite Material Group Company’s manufacturing of profits; for those of you unaware, they didn’t just manufacture laminating film but also manufactured (sic) profits – from 2015 to 2018, RMB 11.9 billion of them ie. US$1.729 BILLION … Read More
And The Hits Just Keep On Coming
Some interesting facts issued forth this past week – I use the word, “facts”, deliberately and advisedly as so much of what we read/hear today only loosely fits that classification (if at all). I am addressing not only the issue of fake news, however defined, but also the deliberate slanting of the raw data used to generate the so-named facts. … Read More
The Jerks Are Jerking Us Around
Good afternoon from Canada – land of the stockpiled canola and the embargoed pork. Well, those of us concerned with international trade can breathe a little easier (but probably not for long). China and the USA have agreed to talk some more and, in the interval, Huawei gets a lifeline for parts and everyone else gets a lifeline from … Read More