Taoyuan Nights

I’ve been too busy watching the markets lately, to find the time to write much about it.
Suffice to say it’s been the most interesting two weeks in finance, of my whole life.
We’ve lost the world’s biggest insurer, and basically all the world’s biggest investment banks are dead or eaten by competitors. Most of this [...]

Heading straight for Taichung/Hsinchu.This picture mirrored from Taiwan CWB website.
According to the CWB, this one has a maximum sustained windstrength of 53m/s currently and gust strength of 63m/s. That basically puts it into the ‘worst type of Typhoon’ category in the Japanese system (grade 5), and the ‘pretty darned bad’ category (Grade 3) in the [...]

Some numbers from Saturday’s Taipei Times…
1. Taiwan has at least 1 million houses that are sitting empty presently.
2. Taiwanese house prices rose 50% in the last few years, while wages rose 2% (I don’t recall the timeframe mentioned in the article – it doesn’t really matter with figures like these).
Now unless the population [...]

The UK, US, and Russian governments just banned short-selling of the shares in financial companies. Check out this picture – showing what happened in the first hour of trading. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Once-in-a-decade (perhaps once-in-a-lifetime) events continue to take place in the world’s financial markets…(click on the image below to [...]

So, on the one hand, the local media and government is saying ‘Don’t Worry! Be Happy!’, and claiming ‘the banks have lots of spare capital and are unaffected by America and Europe’.
Actions, however, speak louder than words.
Action 1: They are pouring taxpayer money into the stockmarket to stop it sinking so fast.
Action 2: They are [...]

This is one of the most exciting days of finance I’ve had this decade!
113 ETF funds collapsed.
The Russian stockmarket is down 17% and trading was halted.
Markets all across Asia were down 5-7% even from the start.
The Shanghai stockmarket is now down 66% since October last year.
HBOS (biggest home loans bank [...]

This alleged Chapter 11 filing by the recently collapsed Lehman Brothers, seems to suggest that Bank of Taiwan and Taipei Fubon might possibly be on the hook for $35 million US as creditors.
Lehman Brothers seems to have collapsed as a result of its exposure to the mortgage backed securities market (which has ‘imploded’ over [...]

Are you Taiwanese? Are you slightly shocked by the heading of this post? If you are, then keep that shock in mind, and keep reading.
My Taiwanese friends often find it very strange that I go outside to enjoy typhoon weather, wearing little more than jeans and a T-shirt. They have this impression that typhoons [...]