Tricky Tuesday – China Stimulus Saves Us Again

Gotta get used to waiting

You know how the ice is

It's thin where you're skating

(This is no social crisis)

Just another tricky day for you, fellah – The Who

I'm ready to give up.  

I WANT to give up, actually.  I want to bash my brains in with a BRIC and just mindlessly BUYBUYBUY so that, when I wake up to yet another Central Bank staving off yet another near-collapse by dumping money on the problem, I can go "Yay, they fixed it" instead of "OMG, we almost collapsed again!"  

It's so much more fun being an optimist.  An optimist can whistle right up to the edge of the cliff and whistle all the way down, right up until the inevitably SPLAT.  Of course the bad news in that case is very short-lived while we otherwise enjoy the entire ride – just like a sperm whale that spontaneously appears in the upper atmostphere (and yes, there's a relevant link for that!).  

The crisis du jour was China's overnight repo rate jumping 20%, from 5% to 6%, which prompted the PBOC to jam their finger into the dike in the form of $12.4Bn in reverse 7-day repurchase agreements AND $30Bn of 21-day revers repos overnight.  

Keep in mind that $42.4Bn is 0.5% of China's ENTIRE GDP – that would be like the Fed tossing $89Bn EXTRA QE on the fire in one day (a month's worth).  Would that make you more or less comfortable about the stability of our economy?  Ha ha – it's a trick question – everything should make you MORE comfortable about out economy.  In fact, investors have never been more comfortable than they are at the moment with…