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Tuesday 20th of August 2019 |
Treasuries, gold and the Japanese yen are clocking "the largest number of outsized rallies" combined since at least 1990, according to Bank of America Corp. Africa |
Meanwhile far from the volatile Frontier, we are witnessing whiplash inducing moves at the centre. There has been a Major Flight to ''quality'' in 2019. Treasuries, gold and the Japanese yen are clocking “the largest number of outsized rallies” combined since at least 1990, according to Bank of America Corp. The latest milestone in the haven frenzy arrived this week, when the yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries slipped below 2% for the first time. “Investors have not been so worried about the future in the past thirty years,” BofA strategists led by Stefano Pascale wrote in an Aug. 13 note. The charge into havens this month has been spurred by flashing recession indicators, trade-war tit-for-tat and data disappointments -- all amid thin liquidity. Gold is up about 18% this year, while the yen is the top performer against the dollar across G-10 currencies [Bloomberg] Safe Havens are priced for Armageddon now. Now the last time G7 Economies went full on ''zombie'' the liquidity surge washed up just about everywhere in every corner of the World. It was characterised as the Global Hunt for Yield. Now when Safe Haven Demand turns parabolic, Investors are signalling they are not interested in the return but only in getting their Principal back. Emerging and Frontier Markets look in big trouble this time around.
Home Thoughts
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The Lonely Londoners is a 1956 novel by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon Africa |
The most striking feature of The Lonely Londoners is its narrative voice. Selvon started writing the novel in standard English but soon found out that such language would not aptly convey the experiences and the unarticulated thoughts and desires of his characters.[5][6] In creating a third person narrator who uses the same creolized form of English as the characters of the novel, Selvon added a new, multiculturalist dimension to the traditional London novel and enhanced the awareness in both readers and writers of a changing London society which could no longer be ignored. Thus, in style and context, The Lonely Londoners "represented a major step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization." [7]
The language used by Selvon's characters and by the narrator contains a multitude of slang expressions. For example, when "the boys" talk about "the Water" or "the Gate", they are referring to Bayswater and Notting Hill respectively. (Unlike today, the Notting Hill area evoked a down-at-heel area of cheap lodgings where Caribbean immigrants could more easily find accommodation than elsewhere in London, but be victims of practices like Rachmanism.) Sometimes referring to themselves and each other as "spades", in their spare time they can be found "liming"—the Caribbean pastime of hanging around with friends eating, talking and drinking—and some of their talk will be "oldtalk", reminiscences of their previous lives in the West Indies and the exchange of news from home. Finally, a white English girl can be a "skin" ("a sharp piece of skin"), a "frauline" [sic], a "cat", a "number", or of course a "chick" or "white pussy".
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"Piccadilly Circus- that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world." - Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners Africa |
“Always, from the first time he went there to see Eros and the lights, that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world. Every time he go there, he have the same feeling like when he see it the first night, drink coca-cola, any time is guinness time, bovril and the fireworks, a million flashing lights, gay laughter, the wide doors of theatres, the huge posters, everready batteries, rich people going into tall hotels, people going to the theatre, people sitting and standing and walking and talking and laughing and buses and cars and Galahad Esquire, in all this, standing there in the big city, in London. Oh Lord.” ― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
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If we burn, you burn with us @abrownepek @business H/T @jorge_guajardo Law & Politics |
if Xi sends in the People's Liberation Army or paramilitaries to crack down, he would transform one of the world’s leading financial centers into an urban battleground. The resistance would bleed the Chinese economy — Hong Kong still plays a vital role in funding China Inc. — and set back China’s soft-power efforts around the world. Beijing could forget about a peaceful unification with Taiwan. Indeed, a conviction is taking hold among protesters that only the prospect of colossal damage to Hong Kong, as well as to China’s global reputation, stands between the city’s freedoms and a military onslaught. A message they spray-paint on city walls and pedestrian bridges reveals their desperation: “If we burn, you burn with us.”
The ominous quote from “The Hunger Games,” though, doesn’t quite capture Xi's dilemma. He may well calculate that he could ride out the storm from a military intervention, just as his predecessors shrugged off international sanctions and opprobrium in 1989 after they crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests with tanks and machine guns. The West had far more leverage over a backward China at that time but hesitated to use it; the allure of China’s vast markets eventually triumphed over its impulse to mete out punishment. Just over a decade later, the U.S. ushered China into the World Trade Organization. A few years after that, the whole world flocked to Beijing to celebrate the Summer Olympics. Many in China believe that the killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of demonstrators around Tiananmen Square laid the foundation for the political stability on which China’s economic success today is founded.
Still, pacifying Hong Kong would be nothing like bringing the Chinese capital to heel. Beijing’s broad avenues, straight and flat, were built to accommodate military parades. Hong Kong Island climbs almost vertically from its waterfront along narrow, twisting roads and concrete staircases, while the district of Kowloon across the harbor contains some of the world’s most densely packed housing estates. Fresh military recruits from the mainland pouring across the border in armored troop carriers would be met in these neighborhoods like an invading army.
Beijing blames what it now calls a “color revolution” on foreign “ black hands,” a euphemism for meddling Americans. In reality, the Hong Kong protests are homegrown and broad-based, and they are largely the product of intransigence. Beijing missed repeated opportunities to respond flexibly to peaceful mass protests by reasonable, sophisticated middle-class residents demanding a democratic say in their post-colonial government — an arrangement that Beijing itself promised under the terms of the territory’s handover from Britain. Instead, it imposed a leader selected by a committee packed with pro-Beijing loyalists. Now it is faced with flash mobs and Molotov cocktails. At its extreme fringes, the protest movement is pushing for Hong Kong’s independence.
Unless he is prepared to torch Hong Kong, the first thing Xi should do is abandon the lame-duck Lam, whose popularity has sunk to record lows. He should then give Lam’s replacement the green light to kill the extradition bill and launch an independent inquiry into the actions of police who have outraged the public by firing tear-gas canisters and other nonlethal projectiles into crowds of protesters at point-blank range, and by appearing to side with pro-Beijing vigilantes. Next, he could revisit political reform. Full democracy, of course, has always been out of the question. But a measure of representative government ought to be achievable. An administration more rooted in the popular will could set about fixing Hong Kong’s deep-seated economic problems, including unaffordable housing.
Political realists will argue that the leader of a Leninist party would never countenance such compromises. In such systems, power is nonnegotiable — “I live, you die” is the ruling creed. And now that the official Chinese media has declared Hong Kong protesters to be akin to terrorists, it shows that Xi and the top Chinese leadership have concluded that force is necessary, even if there’s no consensus on the timing, or whether military intervention will actually work. If that analysis is correct — and it may well be — this is how one of the world’s greatest new economy success stories will end.
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China Compares Hong Kong Democrats to Mao-Era 'Gang of Four' Law & Politics |
Four senior Hong Kong democrats have found themselves labeled by Chinese state media as a new “Gang of Four,” An edition of the party’s People’s Daily newspaper aimed at an overseas audience called the four “secretive middlemen and modern traitors.” “Places and nails have been saved for them on shame pole of history,” the commentary said. The piece published under the Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which is led by Politburo member and former public security chief Guo Shengkun, refers to Lai as a “running dog” of the U.S. and a conduit for “black money,” without elaborating. Last month, several senior Trump administration officials including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton met with Lai, 70, in Washington.
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19-AUG-2019 :: Safe Havens are Priced for Armageddon Now Law & Politics |
The c21st Real Time not only unfolds itself at the Speed of Light but is full of mind bending twists and turns. Jeffrey Epstein ''had a collection of eyeballs on his wall'' [Counterpunch]
The eyeballs make sense, because Epstein was a watcher. ..Is it a coincidence that we all live in a watch-and-collect digital economy? Maybe. But we feast upon each other in the 21st century.
He was, in the words of the New York Times, “not closely monitored.” Jeffrey Epstein was a spy, in a society of spies. He was a collector, in a collector’s economy. He was a watcher, and he died while nobody was watching.
“To the millennials who are looking at the world through their phone Johnnie Walker is way more aspirational than any other brown spirit in East Africa,” Mr Andrew Cowan told African Business Magazine.
The Point is that the Smart Phone is ubiquitous even in the furthest corners of the World and we are all peering at a newsreel. Except, of course, if you are in Kashmir which was described by Nehru as “the snowy bosom of the Himalayas” and which is currently switched off from the c21st. Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Article 370, which protected Kashmir’s demography by restricting residency to Kashmiris alone and, under a sub-section known as Article 35A, forbade the sale of property to non-Kashmiris. Essentially, Modi is seeking to flood the zone. The Periphery is a Tinderbox in many parts of the World. Xinjiang in China is also under lock down and a c21st experiment. Writing in the Washington Post earlier this year, Xiao Qiang, a professor of communications at the University of California, Berkeley, dubbed China’s data-enhanced governance “a digital totalitarian state.” In the last two years thousands of checkpoints have been set up at which passersby must present both their face and their national ID card to proceed on a highway, enter a mosque, or visit a shopping mall. Uighurs are required to install government-designed tracking apps on their smartphones, which monitor their online contacts and the web pages they’ve visited. Kashmir, Gaza and Xinjiang are being managed in precisely the same way and it is precisely because they all reside at the Periphery and can be cut off from the World.
Interestingly, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that China's Huawei had exported this same model to many parts of Africa.
While many of the projects are rudimentary, Huawei has sold advanced video-surveillance and facial-recognition systems in more than two dozen developing countries, according to data gathered by Steven Feldstein, an expert in digital surveillance at Boise State University and a former Africa specialist at the State Department. Huawei lists foreign firms among its partners in its safe-city products, including U.S. smart-sensor manufacturer and systems integrator Johnson Controls International PLC and iOmniscient Pty. Ltd., an Australian producer of A.I. systems that analyze video, sound and smell.
Emerging and Frontier Markets have been encountering a bout of serious turbulence. The rand [which can be viewed as a Proxy for the Global appetite for risk] is back as the world’s most volatile major currency, and options pricing suggests it’s not going to lose that status any time soon. The premium of options to sell the rand over those to buy it, known as the 25 Delta risk reversal, widened 23 basis points to 338. South Africa’s currency has depreciated 6.5% versus the dollar in August, the worst performance among emerging-market currencies after Argentina’s peso. Argentina'a MerVal Index fell 37% in a single day the largest 1-day decline in its history. This was a 17-sigma event which means that it should not have happened even once in the history of the universe (assuming a normal distribution which markets do not follow). Stock Markets from Lagos to Nairobi to Johannesburg are in reverse. There is a big negative spillover happening in front of our eyes.
Meanwhile far from the volatile Frontier, we are witnessing whiplash inducing moves at the centre. There has been a Major Flight to ''quality'' in 2019. Treasuries, gold and the Japanese yen are clocking “the largest number of outsized rallies” combined since at least 1990, according to Bank of America Corp. The latest milestone in the haven frenzy arrived this week, when the yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries slipped below 2% for the first time.
“Investors have not been so worried about the future in the past thirty years,” BofA strategists led by Stefano Pascale wrote in an Aug. 13 note.
The charge into havens this month has been spurred by flashing recession indicators, trade-war tit-for-tat and data disappointments -- all amid thin liquidity. Gold is up about 18% this year, while the yen is the top performer against the dollar across G-10 currencies [Bloomberg]
Safe Havens are priced for Armageddon now.
Now the last time G7 Economies went full on ''zombie'' the liquidity surge washed up just about everywhere in every corner of the World. It was characterised as the Global Hunt for Yield. Now when Safe Haven Demand turns parabolic, Investors are signalling they are not interested in the return but only in getting their Principal back. Emerging and Frontier Markets look in big trouble this time around.
Iqbal: “In the bitter chill of winter shivers his naked body / Whose skill wraps the rich in royal shawls''
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19-AUG-2019 :: Emerging and Frontier Markets have been encountering a bout of serious turbulence. Emerging Markets |
Emerging and Frontier Markets have been encountering a bout of serious turbulence. The rand [which can be viewed as a Proxy for the Global appetite for risk] is back as the world’s most volatile major currency, and options pricing suggests it’s not going to lose that status any time soon. The premium of options to sell the rand over those to buy it, known as the 25 Delta risk reversal, widened 23 basis points to 338. South Africa’s currency has depreciated 6.5% versus the dollar in August, the worst performance among emerging-market currencies after Argentina’s peso. Argentina'a MerVal Index fell 37% in a single day the largest 1-day decline in its history. This was a 17-sigma event which means that it should not have happened even once in the history of the universe (assuming a normal distribution which markets do not follow). Stock Markets from Lagos to Nairobi to Johannesburg are in reverse. There is a big negative spillover happening in front of our eyes.
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Diamond Trust Bank (Kenya) Ltd.reports H1 2019 EPS +11.031% Africa |
Par Value: 4/- Closing Price: 119.00 Total Shares Issued: 279602220.00 Market Capitalization: 33,272,664,180 EPS: 23.91 PE: 4.977
Prominent Kenyan commercial bank
Diamond Trust Bank Kenya Limited H1 2019 results through 30th June 2019 vs. 30th June 2018 H1 Kenya government securities – held to maturity 88.968521b vs. 99.726123b -10.787% H1 Loans and advances to customers (net) 190.777859b vs. 198.233933b -3.761% H1 Balances due from Central Banks 26.198495b vs. 15.488792b +69.145% H1 Total assets 375.929682b vs. 376.077751b -0.039% H1 Customer deposits 283.065287b vs. 281.745588b +0.468% H1 Total equity 62.505088b vs. 54.990268b +13.666% H1 Net interest income 9.187701b vs. 9.928493b -7.461% H1 Total non-interest income 2.976942b vs. 2.742867b +8.534% H1 Total operating income 12.164643b vs. 12.671360b -3.999% H1 Loan loss provision [0.534192b] vs. [1.677189b] -68.150% H1 Total operating expenses [6.225470b] vs. [7.276902b] -14.449% H1 Profit before tax and exceptional items 5.939173b vs. 5.394458b +10.098% H1 Profit after tax and exceptional items 4.132368b vs. 3.755323b +10.040% EPS 13.89 vs. 12.51 +11.031% Total NPL and advances 12.863491b vs. 12.924463b -0.472% Liquidity ratio 54.3% vs. 51.1% +3.200%
Conclusions
Loan Loss Provision refers. Otherwise its been a very defensive posture However, Price to Book of 0.6 is egregious.
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