Beijing Warns Of "Unwavering Resolve" In Huawei Fight, Accuses Washington Of "Bullying & Blackmail"

As the anti-American sloganeering reaches an unprecedented level of froth (there's now an unofficial trade war 'fight song') across China, the Commerce Department has softened its anti-Huawei stance, calling for a 90-day reprieve  to allow American broadband companies more time to work out a 'Plan B'.

The delay will cover continued operation of existing networks and equipment, as well as support to existing handsets and other limited actions, according to Bloomberg.

But that's not even the biggest trade headline of the morning, as analysts wonder how Beijing will retaliate for the war on Huawei. Anyone who thinks Beijing won't respond is being naive, China's ambassador to the EU warned Tuesday. China will provide a "necessary response" to Washington's "wrong behavior."

"This is wrong behavior, so there will be a necessary response," Zhang Ming, China’s envoy to the EU, said in an interview in Brussels on Monday. "Chinese companies’ legitimate rights and interests are being undermined, so the Chinese government will not sit idly by."

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Huawei will not bow to US pressure: founder

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is ready to deal with Washington’s crackdown and will reduce its reliance on US components, its founder told Japanese media.

President Donald Trump effectively barred Huawei from the US market on Wednesday and added it to a list which would restrict US sales to the firm amid an escalating trade war with Beijing.

“We have already been preparing for this,” Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei told a group of Japanese journalists Saturday in his first interview since Trump’s move.

Ren said Huawei would continue to develop its own components to reduce its dependence on outside suppliers.

Huawei is a rapidly expanding leader in 5G technology but remains dependent on foreign suppliers.

It buys about $67 billion worth of components each year, including about $11 billion from US suppliers, according to The Nikkei business daily.

The usually elusive Ren, 74, has come out of the shadows in recent months in the face of increasing pressure on his company.

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Trade Optimism Fizzles As China Says No Plans For More Talks

Well, it looks like President Trump finally did it. He finally pushed Beijing so hard on Huawei that they had no choice but to respond.

The Chinese weren't kidding when they warned that Washington's latest aggression toward Huawei - adding the Chinese telecoms giant to a blacklist that will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Huawei to buy components from American companies - might crash trade talks.

Because after the Commerce Department formally added Huawei to the blacklist, the Chinese media and Chinese officials turned up the rhetoric, warning that there are no plans for another round of talks. Markets didn't take this well: Chinese stocks plunged 2.5% overnight on Friday - a big drop, though still not as bad as the 3% decline from last Monday,the market's worst day in three years. European shares didn't fare much better because, as one analyst explained to Bloomberg...

"The China state media commentaries fueled concerns that the U.S.-China trade disputes will prolong, deterring risk-taking," said Koji Fukaya, chief executive officer at FPG Securities Co. in Tokyo. "This issue will probably be one of the major market drivers for a while as U.S.-China trade war influences global economic conditions."

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China's Huawei, 70 Affiliates Blacklisted By US Commerce Department

Reuters reports that the U.S. Commerce Department is adding Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and 70 affiliates to its so-called "Entity List" - a move that will make it much more difficult for the telecom giant to buy parts and components from U.S. companies. U.S. officials said the decision would also make it difficult for Huawei to sell some products because of its reliance on U.S. suppliers.

Department of Commerce Announces the Addition of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. to the Entity List

WASHINGTON – Today, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it will be adding Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and its affiliates to the Bureau’s Entity List. This action stems from information available to the Department that provides a reasonable basis to conclude that Huawei is engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interest. This information includes the activities alleged in the Department of Justice’s public superseding indictment of Huawei, including alleged violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), conspiracy to violate IEEPA by providing prohibited financial services to Iran, and obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation of those alleged violations of U.S. sanctions.

The sale or transfer of American technology to a company or person on the Entity List requires a license issued by BIS, and a license may be denied if the sale or transfer would harm U.S. national security or foreign policy interests. The listing will be effective when published in the Federal Register.

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China 'Green Shoots' Are Dead - Retail Sales, Industrial Production, & FAI Slump

On the back of one better than expected soft survey PMI print, the world became convinced that as green shoots emerged, China was about to be reborn into magnificent credit-fuelled expansion and would save the world.

Tonight, that narrative died - everything missed expectations:

Retail sales rose just 7.2% (against +8.7% in March) - lowest since May 2003 (the 7.2% year-on-year rise in retail sales is actually weaker than all the estimates. The lowest was 7.5%, and the median was 8.6%)

Industrial Production growth slumped from a hope-filled +6.5% YTD YoY in March to 6.2%.

Fixed Asset Investment slowed to just 6.1% YoY.

Not green shoot-y!

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Gold, Bitcoin, & The Gigantic Global Debt Bubble

Today’s the first day in a long time financial markets appear willing to at least consider the reality of the geopolitical situation on the ground for what it is, as opposed to what most people would like it to be. As I’ve noted for months, the “trade war” is just one battle in a much larger, increasingly unstable struggle between the U.S. and China for global power and leverage to shape the next paradigm of world history.

A failure to appreciate how big this really is explains why investors have been so willing to swallow unrealistic happy talk from both sides. The risk that needs to be discounted in the market isn’t a risk of higher tariffs, but the risk of WW3. The U.S. and China were never going to sign a trade deal and blissfully return to the ways things were. That world is over. We now find ourselves in the very early days of a historic struggle to influence the future.

The Global Debt Bubble

At the core of everything unsustainable and destabilizing about the “old world” we live in, lies the ever expanding global debt bubble. In early 2018, I wrote an opinion piece for The Hill titled, Bitcoin Isn’t the Bubble — the Global Financial System Is, in which I noted:

While we’re on the topic of bubbles, it seems the truly gigantic bubble in the world isn’t bitcoin, but rather the global debt market. This leviathan now stands at around $233 trillion, or 318 percent of global GDP. Even more troubling, an estimated $11 trillion of government debt now trades at negative yields. This means whoever is buying this paper is doing so despite the fact they are guaranteed to lose money on the “investment.” Much of this buying has been propelled by central banks which can print their own currency and buy debt indiscriminately. This is not characteristic of a healthy financial system (particularly so many years into a global recovery), but rather a zombie one that’s been artificially propped up since the financial crisis.

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Why One Bank Thinks That Much More Market Pain Will Be Needed To Close Any Trade Deal

Futures are sharply lower again after the weekend failed to provide any substantive evidence that the "constructive" tone suggested by both Steven Mnuchin and Liu He on Friday was present, and in fact, soundbites from both president Trump and Chinese media indicated that the latest trade war escalation may last well into 2020 without a resolution, with China potentially waiting to see if Joe Biden is be elected president, helping to resolve the trade war.

Yet while we now know how and why the trade talks unraveled so fast thanks to a detailed expose by the WSJ, which reports that "U.S. and Chinese governments both sent signals ahead of their trade talks in Washington last week that a pact was so near they would discuss the logistics of a signing ceremony" but "in a matter of days, the dynamic shifted so markedly that the Chinese deliberated whether to even show up after President Trump ordered a last-minute increase in tariffs on Chinese imports because the U.S. viewed China as reneging on previous commitments", the question remains what this means for markets.

While there have been various "hot takes" on what the latest escalation means for risk assets, with many suggesting that a "no deal" outcome potentially triggering a plunge in the S&P below 2,600 and forcing the Fed to cut rates, one of the better assessments of the future state of capital markets as a function of the ongoing trade war, comes from Bank of America's chief economist Ethan Harris, who in "Once more to the brink" writes that his "long-standing view on the trade war is that the Trump Administration wants deals and will compromise, but only after it extracts the maximum concessions." To Harris, this is a pattern of big demands and moderate concessions that we have seen play out repeatedly. And this case is no different: both the US and China want a deal, "but motivating the inevitable compromise requires some combination of market, economic and political pain."

Specifically, we have seen this framework play out in the past year in two ways:

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US Hikes China Tariffs After Talks Result In No Progress; China Vows To Retaliate

After much theatrics and 11th hour negotiations, the US more than doubled tariffs to 25% on more than $200 billion in good imports from China just after midnight on Friday in what has been dubbed the "most dramatic step yet" in Donald Trump’s crusade to extract trade concessions from Beijing, deepening a nearly two-year old conflict that has roiled global markets and impacted the world economy.

While the White House said in a statement that talks are set to resume Friday, setting the stage for a tense final day of negotiations between Liu He, China's vice premier and Robert Lighthizer, the US trade rep, Bloomberg reports that according to "close observers" there is little hope for any meaningful breakthroughs, especially since Liu does not have the authority to make any meaningful commitments, while an alleged phone call between Trump and president Xi yielded no positive results. It was also unclear, Bloomberg adds, whether China had resolved the internal debates that had led to last week’s rescinding of prior commitments to enshrine reforms agreed in Chinese law.

News that the US would hike tariffs, and set off a sequence of events that would most likely result in further escalation pushed US equity futures, treasury yields and the USDJPY lower around midnight.

In response to the tariff hike, China immediately said in a statement it "deeply regrets the latest tariff hike" and that it will be forced to take countermeasures against the US actions, but didn’t specify how, even as it said that it sill hopes the two sides can resolve issues via ongoing consultations.

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Amazon Hit By "Serious" Hack, Resulting In "Extensive" Fraud, Cash Stolen From Merchants

We recently documented  how Amazon has come under fire from its merchants for allegedly trying to undercut them on pricing and products. Now, the e-commerce giant is under scrutiny for a different reason: security. Amazon is now saying it was hit by an "extensive" fraud last year, revealing in court documents that hackers were able to transfer funds from merchant accounts over the course of six months, according to Bloomberg.

The "serious" online attack included hackers breaking into about 100 seller accounts and moving cash from loans or sales into their own bank accounts. The hack took place between May 2018 and October 2018, according to Amazon’s lawyers.

Amazon said it was still looking into the compromised accounts and that it believed hackers changed the details on its Seller Central platform to bank accounts in their name. Amazon believes that the accounts were compromised by phishing techniques that looked for login information. Amazon has reportedly concluded its investigation of the incident.

Lawyers for the online retailer asked a judge in London to approve searches of account statements at Barclays and Prepay, two banks that "have become innocently mixed up in the wrongdoing." Amazon says that it needed the documents “to investigate the fraud, identify and pursue the wrongdoers, locate the whereabouts of misappropriated funds, bring the fraud to an end and deter future wrongdoing."

The filing doesn’t denote how the suspected wrongdoers were able to add new bank account information to merchant accounts. Amazon has issued more than $1 billion in loans to merchants and one of the units named in the filing was Amazon Capital Services U.K., a division of the company responsible for making these loans.

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Behind The Recent Crypto Surge? Chinese Banks Are Quietly Running Out Of Dollars

Cryptocurrencies have had a good run in recent weeks, as a sudden renewed demand has lifted all boats and taken Bitcoin back near $6000 this morning...

The catalyst has remained unclear - anticipation of an ETF? Growing institutional interest? Short-squeeze? Manipulation? Or, just plain old safe-haven flows as various nations around the world collapse into totalitarianism?

We may have found one, rather large, answer - from China, where, as SCMP reports, authorities have quietly begun 'soft' capital controls on foreign currency withdrawals

Chinese banks have increased their scrutiny of foreign-currency withdrawals and quietly reduced the amount of US dollars people are allowed to withdraw, tightening the country’s capital controls as the nearly year-long US-China trade war bites.

The issue was thrust into the spotlight on Friday when a viral video clip showed a bank cashier unable to answer a furious customer demanding to know why she was not allowed to withdraw US$200 from her dollar-denominated account, even though she was within her quota.

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The Dow Made A Miraculous 400 Point Recovery, But Now Renewed Trade Fears Are Sending Markets Plunging Once Again

If your head is spinning from the wild fluctuations that have shaken global financial markets, you are definitely not alone.  On Sunday, President Trump angrily threatened to hit China with enormous new tariffs, and it looked like hopes for a trade deal between the United States and China had collapsed.  Overnight, Chinese stocks had their worst session in three years, and many expected U.S. stocks to experience a similar plunge.  But then on Monday we learned that the Chinese had decided to move forward with trade talks this week anyway, and global financial markets started rebounding in a major way.  In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded more than 400 points…

The Dow closed just 66 points lower on Monday, recovering from a plunge of as much as 471 points. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also erased their sharp losses, ending just 0.5% lower.

The comeback signals investors don’t believe President Donald Trump’s surprise threat to impose higher tariffs on China will spark a painful deepening of the trade war. Optimists are even hoping an historic trade deal will still be reached.

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Trade Deal Dead: Trump Says 10% China Tariff Rising To 25% On Friday, Another $325BN In Goods To Be Taxed

So much for months and months of constant leaks, headlines, tweets, and press reports that US-China trade talks are going great, and are imminent amid an ocean of "optimism" (meant solely to sucker in amateurs into the most obvious bull headfake since 1987). 

Just after noon on Sunday, President Trump tweeted that 10% tariffs paid by China on $200 billion in goods will rise to 25% on Friday, and that - contrary to what he himself and his chief economist, Larry Kudlow has said for months, talks on a trade deal have been going too slowly.

And, just to underscore his point, Trump also threatened to impose 25% tariffs on an additional $325 billion of Chinese goods “shortly.”

With the tariff rate on numerous goods originally set at 10% and set to more than double in 2019, Trump postponed that decision after China and the US agreed to sit down for trade talks; following Trump's tweet it is now confirmed that trade talks have hit an impasse and that escalation will be needed to break the stalemate.

It was as recently as Friday that Vice President Mike Pence told CNBC that Trump remained hopeful that he could strike a deal with China (at the same time as he was urging for a rate cut from the Fed).

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China And Russia: Whoopin' Uncle Sam At His Own Game

Country A builds factories and plants, it employees zillions of people who manufacture things, it launches massive infrastructure programs, paves millions of miles of highways and roads, opens new sea lanes, vastly expands its high-speed rail network, and pumps profits back into productive operations that turbo-charge its economy and bolster its stature among the nations of the world.

Country B has the finest military in the world, it has more than 800 bases scattered across the planet, and spends more on weapons systems and war-making than all the other nations combined. Country B has gutted its industrial core, hollowed out its factory base, allowed its vital infrastructure to crumble, outsourced millions of jobs, off-shored thousands of businesses, plunged the center of the country into permanent recession, delivered control of its economy to the Central Bank, and recycled 96 percent of its corporate and financial profits into a stock buyback scam that sucks critical capital out of the economy and into the pockets of corrupt Wall Street plutocrats whose voracious greed is pushing the world towards another catastrophic meltdown.

Which of these two countries is going to lead the world into the future? Which of these two countries offers a path to security and prosperity that doesn’t involve black sites, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassinations, color-coded revolutions, waterboarding, strategic disinformation, false-flag provocations, regime change and perennial war?

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Americans Can't Afford To Buy A Home In 70% Of The Country

Even at a time of low interest rates and rising wages, Americans simply can’t afford a home in more than 70% of the country, according to CBS. Out of 473 US counties that were analyzed in a recent report, 335 listed median home prices were more than what average wage earners could afford. According to the report from ATTOM Data Solutions, these counties included Los Angeles and San Diego in California, as well as places like Maricopa County in Arizona.

New York City claimed the largest share of a person's income to purchase a home. While on average, earners nationwide needed to spend only about 33% of their income on a home, residents in Brooklyn and Manhattan need to shell out more than 115% of their income. In San Francisco this number is about 103%. Homes were found to be affordable in places like Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia.

This news is stunning because homes are considerably more affordable today than they were a year ago. Although prices are rising in many areas, they are also falling in places like Manhattan. Unaffordability in the market has been the result of slower home building and owners staying in their homes longer. Both have reduced the supply of homes in the market.

And the market may continue to create better conditions for buyers. Affordability could improve because of the fact that homes are out of reach for so many seekers, according to Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions. Today’s market is also more affordable than it was a decade ago, before the crisis. Home prices were about the same prior to the crisis, even though income adjusted for inflation was lower.

"What kept the market going was looser lending standards, so that was compensating for affordability issues," Teta said. Since then, standards have toughened (for now, at least).

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Chinese Drugmaker Discloses $4.4 Billion Accounting Fraud

It looks like China's unstoppable default tsunami is about to claim its latest corporate victim...and thanks to lax oversight that allowed the company to get away with what appears to be a staggering accounting fraud, thousands of unsuspecting investors might be left holding the bag.

According to Bloomberg, Kangmei Pharmaceutical Co., one of China’s largest listed drugmakers, revealed on Tuesday that it had overstated its cash holdings by $4.4 billion. Unsurprisingly, the revelation, which immediately exposed the company to be teetering on the brink of insolvency, sent its shares and bonds tumbling. Its shares, which are a constituent of MSCI's global index, plunged by the 10% daily limit. Its 2.4 billion yuan ($356 million) notes due in 2022 dropped by as much as 60 yuan (about $9).

It's just the latest example of why investors must be wary of Chinese companies due to lax regulations, even as its equity and bond markets are becoming increasingly internationalized. The company's revelation came four months after it revealed that Chinese authorities had launched an investigation into the company.

One of BBG's sources said the restatement is 'unprecedented' in the history of Chinese security markets.

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