Taoyuan Nights

PRC government triples the tax rate on trading shares (0.3% stamp duty from 0.1%).
Shanghai market index drops 6%.
Shanghai stockbrokers at a loss trying to explain the concept of a market fall to recent joiners who have only ever seen the market go up.
Don’t worry lads - plenty more to come. […]

Take a look here. Thanks to www.re-discovery.org!

Several newspapers published a syndicated article recently, based on a survey of investor* behaviour in the Shanghai market (SSE).
I’ve already talked about how completely fracked up these folk are, and I think the numbers in this article are a particularly excellent quantitive demonstration of this fact.
ChinaHR.com, a Web-based job placing firm, said that of […]

While perusing the Taipei Times yesterday, I noticed that the Taiwanese government has announced they wish to push the Taiwan banking sector into a wave of consolidation. Consolidation just means “companies buying each other out” or “merging together to form bigger companies”. The aim is to produce some Taiwanese heavyweight banks - banks that are […]

20250504 (match all the digits for the grand prize of $2 million NTD).
11489122 (prizes for matching 3 or more digits starting at the right hand side).
13311551 (prizes for matching 3 or more digits starting at the right hand side).
35345410 (prizes for matching 3 or […]

Sunset over Taoyuan.

Pastel mountains.

Taoyuan, the dark city.

(picture liberated from the Xinhua ‘news’ service)
I’d like to draw your attention to this article. In it, the Times exposes a few more of the completely bonkers things that are happening right now in the PRC.
Some of my favourite quotes from the article:
“Trading hours coincided with my shift so I gave up my cab,” […]

Man, I had some awesome games of badminton tonight. As you can tell from the headline, there were several smash!smash!smash!!!! situations which demanded to be punctuated with shouted quotes from “300″, though in fact I just barely managed to restrain myself from actually doing it, mostly. And then several situations involving trickshots played while jumping, […]

Hahahahaha!

If you’re a foreigner living in Taiwan, this is relatively interesting news. Taiwan is moving to an electronic visa/ARC/permanent residency system as of July. No longer will we have to rely on ARCs that look about as well-manufactured and sturdy as a ticket for a school disco.
Further: retina scans will be introduced at the […]