Times have been tight at China Economic Review, there’s no denying. Locking the stationary cabinet, deftly switching our free Nescafe supplies with dirt and turning the thermostat up to its Chongqing setting only was able to get us so far. There was only one thing left to do: Cut back on our purchases of Chinese bonds.
Apparently, every other company and investor had the same idea. It may seem impossible, but China appears to have turned off the liquidity spigot. In the midst of the cash crunch, investors first scaled back on their purchases of government bonds and later bank bonds.
So what is being done with all that cash Beijing would otherwise be injecting into the economy? Pet projects, obviously. We certainly have our theories about what Xi Jinping is doing with most of it.
In a very slightly more plausible vein, China may have thrown some of that cash toward building the world’s fastest supercomputer. While superfluous sounding, the computer is purportedly the only thing that is fast enough to keep tabs on all of the more than 3 million people in Tibet and the rumors they may be spreading. China has now linked every phone and internet connection to the real name of a Tibet resident, although they were puzzled to find that about 1.5 million people have the name Jungney Dorje.
The rest of the cash crunch we’re going to blame squarely on this shuaige: Fang Xinghai. Having just been promoted from a Shanghai planning post to the office of Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic, Fang has brought some proposals with him. Most seem to focus on housing all the nation’s financial institutions in unusually shaped buildings.
We know what you’re thinking, a rundown of the week’s news with no mention of a certain NSA leaker holed up in Hong Kong? Yes, you’ve been had. We all know where cash is really being siphoned to: one man who will soon have the world’s largest, cushiest expat package.
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