Bloomberg (October 31)
“Japan’s central bank insists it still wants to cap long-term market rates,” but their “actions suggest officials are losing the stomach for it.” Kazuo Ueda is dismantling “the cumbersome legacy of his predecessor… more rapidly” than expected “when he took the helm of the Bank of Japan.” Nevertheless, BOJ officials are insisting that the “policy is only being tweaked.” This threatens “the credibility of its communications” as “key parts of the BOJ’s entire approach to setting borrowing costs are being removed or watered down.”
Tags: BOJ, Cap, Central bank, Credibility, Cumbersome, Japan, Legacy, Long term, Market rates, Officials, Predecessor, Threatens, Ueda
Washington Post (December 21)
“China’s new covid nightmare could become a global catastrophe. The absence of a coherent fallback strategy” not only “threatens a fresh set of nightmares for its population, its economy and the Communist Party leadership. A new crisis could shake the whole world. As the Wuhan outbreak demonstrated three years ago, what begins in China does not necessarily stay there.”
Tags: China, Communist party, Covid, Crisis, Economy, Fallback strategy, Global catastrophe, Leadership, Nightmare, Outbreak, Population, Threatens, Wuhan
LA Times (June 1)
“For the U.S. and China, it’s not a trade war anymore — it’s something worse.” Though it’s still framed in terms of trade, “the conflict with China has widened beyond the original trade-based issues” and it “now threatens to become a far wider and more ominous confrontation,” potentially a clash of civilizations.