"Economists are pessimists: they've predicted 8 of the last 3 depressions."
--Barry Asmus

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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Lucky Chinese PIIGS, Sacred (Crazy) War, And World Stocks

Anyone remember this quote from Monday? "Despite concerns from Friday, North Korea has not felt "any need to retaliate against every despicable provocation", and did not end up reigniting the shooting part of the as-yet unresolved Korean Conflict." Well, it's been three days and Pyongyang has apparently decided to change their minds on the subject. Now, Kim Yong-chun (the North Korean Minister of Armed Forces) is on record as saying that "to counter the enemy's intentional drive to push the situation to the brink of war, our revolutionary forces are making preparations to begin a sacred war at any moment necessary based on nuclear deterrent."[1]
China, which must be getting increasingly tired of North Korea[2], confirmed yesterday's report that it stands ready to bail out the PIIGS. Or, in the words of Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu from yesterday's press conference, "China-EU economic and trade cooperation is featured by mutual benefit, win-win outcome and sound development momentum. The two sides agree that in the context of slow recovery of the world economy and existence of many uncertainties and unstable factors, the two should strengthen cooperation for stable and healthy development of the two economies as well as strong, sustainable and balanced growth of the world economy."
And finally, in the (hopefully) good news category, the MSCI world equity index hit its highest level since September 2008 and is up nearly 10% just in 2010.
[1] Security analysts are pretty sure they don't actually have any way to launch the "nuclear deterrent".
[2] And which still doesn't want to replace the United States as the world's sole military and economic superpower. Really. Trust them.

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