http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=asia

I dont think so, still alot more stampeding investors

Just last week's rise knocked off so really nothing worth worrying about. Interesting though that it's probably about the same value fall as Feb's one given that it's just about doubled since.

Like everything else now, once the markets see something once, when it happens again it's just background noise unless it directly affects credit availability. Until something really knocks that, things will continue. Now if China really tried to stop the madness rather than make noises, that could be something interesting.

Dont know if the FTSE agrees with you http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/fds/hi/...iew/default.stm

Down > 1%

I dont think so, still alot more stampeding investors

This is the effect of tripling stamp duty.

I don't think it's the neginning of the end but I'll be surprised of the US finishes in the black.

I'll be surprised of the US finishes in the black.

Scratch that... it seems to have been shrugged off.

Shanghai Composite (China) 3,670.40 8:00am -439.25 (-10.69%)
On top of the 6%+ drop last week.

I wonder if it will be contagious. So far its a yawn here.

This is the price you pay for making all that money from thin air.

One day, i think soon, the USD$ is going to go into meltdown and then it's time to start saving food and not money and this all comes with a big thanks to the Blair/Bush NWO pact.

I'm surprised you all haven't posted how this is the start of the global economic meltdown like you did last time.

Once bitten, I guess

However, the P/E ratios for houses are worse than those for stocks if you compare where we are today to where houses were pre-dotcom. If the average house in the UK is around 200k and the average salary is 23k the P/E must be at its highest in history.

We live in highly unpredictable times.

I'm surprised you all haven't posted how this is the start of the global economic meltdown like you did last time.

Once bitten, I guess

The CSI 300 Index dropped 204.55, or 5.8 percent, to 3306.88 as of the 11:30 a.m. local-time break, after gaining as much as 0.5 percent. The benchmark has tumbled 21 percent from its May 29 peak after the stamp duty was tripled to 0.3 percent.

The state of matters all over the country was so alarming, that George I shortened his intended stay in Hanover, and returned in all haste to England. He arrived on the 11th of November, and Parliament was summoned to meet on the 8th of December. In the mean time, public meetings were held in every considerable town of the empire, at which petitions were adopted, praying the vengeance of the Legislature upon the South Sea directors, who, by their fraudulent practices, had brought the nation to the brink of ruin. Nobody seemed to imagine that the nation itself was as culpable as the South Sea Company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people,--the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler quality in the national character, or the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors. These things were never mentioned. The people were a simple, honest, hard-working people, ruined by a gang of robbers, who were to be hanged, drawn, and quartered without mercy.... In times of great commercial prosperity there has been a tendency to over-speculation on several occasions since then. The success of one project generally produces others of a similar kind. Popular imitativeness will always, in a trading nation, seize hold of such successes, and drag a community too anxious for profits into an abyss from which extrication is difficult. Bubble companies, of a kind similar to those engendered by the South Sea project, lived their little day in the famous year of the panic, 1825. On that occasion, as in 1720, knavery gathered a rich harvest from cupidity, but both suffered when the day of reckoning came. The schemes of the year 1836 threatened, at one time, results as disastrous; but they were happily averted before it was too late. The South Sea project thus remains, and, it is to be hoped, always will remain, the greatest example in British history, of the infatuation of the people for commercial gambling. From the bitter experience of that period, posterity may learn how dangerous it is to let speculation riot unrestrained, and to hope for enormous profits from inadequate causes. Degrading as were the circumstances, there is wisdom to be gained from the lesson which they teach.

Seems Bloomberg and co don't want to hype the news either - Chinese stock market details buried in the text of a general one about Asia.

Funny how they were following it a lot closer before....

Declan described it as "one of those days", then they all had a bit of a false shoulder laugh.

Inoffensive Declan sums up the BBC's business news coverage.

But as mentioned about, the Chinese stock market and the Chinese economy are two different animals.

Another big drop on the Chinese SMs, but the thread title is a bit OTT IMO. The SM isn't the economy - this is just the rich and savvy taking easy money from the less rich and naive. After a 21% drop, the SM is merely back to where it was just 6 weeks ago!! FTSE and DJ futures are actually slightly up on their close yesterday.

Actually, China is coming apart at the seams, and even China's leaders know it. In March, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said that China is "unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable." What I wrote in January, 2005, is that China is becoming increasingly unstable and approaching a civil war.

China has tens of thousands of regional riots and demonstrations every year, and there was a big one that made international news just this past week. Thousands of peasants in south-west China have attacked family planning officials, overturned cars and set fire to government buildings in a riot sparked by the state's "one-child" policy. The "one-child" policy was adopted in the late 1970s as a means of controlling population; it forbids any woman from having more than one child, on pain of fine or forced abortion.

According to the news stories, local "family planning" officials have been acting like The Sopranos in enforcing the policy, forcing them to pay thousands of dollars in fine, or having their homes destroyed, possessions taken, face smashed, and fingers broken.

What I read into this situation is that China's family planning officials are over their head in debt in some way, and they're using the kind of desperate measures that Tony Soprano might use to generate some income. That's why the peasants were revolting.

Well, exactly the same thing has been happening in China. At a time like this, there's so much money (liquidity) is available, that people are willing to invest in almost anything.

Even graveyards.

Yes, there's been a graveyard bubble in China.

It's actually very much like the worldwide real estate bubble. People purchase real estate with no intention of living there, but simply to "flip" the property and sell it again when the price go up.

In China ten years ago, you could have purchased an austere burial tomb for about $25. Today you'd have to pay more like $250, and some go for as much as $2500. In recent years, people have been purchasing graveyards, and then selling the tombs at bubble prices. The bubble has also dramatically pushed up funeral prices.

People have been getting scammed.

One man bought 24 empty graveyard plots in a cemetery called Spiritual Spring. He spent his family's entire life savings -- around $20,000. But the company never delivered the plots, and all he has to show for his investment is 20 certificates -- worthless pieces of paper.

The story of what's been happening in China reminds me of the last days of the Tulipomania bubble of the 1630s, as described in Edward Chancellor's 1999 book, Devil Take the Hindmost, a history of financial speculation:

"No actual delivery of tulips took place during the height of the boom in late 1636 and early 1637 as the bulbs remained snug in the ground. A market in tulip futures appeared, known as the windhandel (the wind trade): sellers promised to deliver a bulb of a certain type and weight the following spring, buyers took the right to delivery -- in the meantime, cash settlement could be made for any difference in market price. Most transactions were expedited with personal credit notes which also fell due in the spring when the bulbs would be dug up and delivered. Gaergoedt boasts of having made 60,000 guilders from his tulip speculations but admits that he has only received "other people's writing." By the later stages of the mania the fusion of the windhandel with paper credit created a perfect symmetry of insubstantiality: most transactions were for tulip bulbs that could never be delivered because they didn't exist and were paid for with credit notes that could never be honoured because the money wasn't there." (pp. 16-18)

Perhaps it's easier to understand how China could be having a graveyard bubble if you realize that it was just like Europe's own Tulipomania bubble.

the guy who p1sses me off more is that t1t who presents on the beeb, the one who did the dancing prog (that I never watched btw , the missus might have had it on once or twice ), what's his name ??

Another big drop on the Chinese SMs, but the thread title is a bit OTT IMO. The SM isn't the economy - this is just the rich and savvy taking easy money from the less rich and naive. After a 21% drop, the SM is merely back to where it was just 6 weeks ago!! FTSE and DJ futures are actually slightly up on their close yesterday.

21% drop is huge taking into account how volatile and nervous SM's are, imagine the little guy trading his stocks (not really knowing what he is doing) this must be a very shaky time.
Another 5-10% and we could have complete pandamonium and panic selling, some people going to get seriously burnt here I feel.