Willem's Planet

I had to adjust to my jet lag from Down Under and the Far East this week, and it is going a lot better.   The financial markets also seemed to have calmed somewhat after the Chinese stock market held up (and the circuit breakers are no longer used).  A decent December USA job report came out : employment rose by 292,000; the unemployment rate is unchanged at 5.0%.  But check out the concerns in the January 2016 investment outlook authored by Bill Gross, now working for Janus Capital Group. He went by the moniker ‘the bond king’ (maybe he still does?), back when he ran PIMCO’s $270.0 billion Total Return Fund (PTTRX).

Here’s an extract from Bill’s January 2016 news letter :

The Romans gave their Plebian citizens a day at the Coliseum, and the French royalty gave the Bourgeoisie a piece of figurative “cake,” so it may be true to form that in the still prosperous developed economies of 2016, we provide Fantasy Sports, cellphone game apps, sexting, and fast food to appease the masses. Keep them occupied and distracted at all costs before they recognize that half of the U.S. population doesn’t go to work in the morning and that their real wages after conservatively calculated inflation have barely budged since the mid 1980’s. Confuse them with demagogic and religious oriented political candidates to believe that tomorrow will be a better day and hope that Ferguson, Missouri and its lookalikes will fade to the second page or whatever it’s called these days in new-age media.

Meanwhile, manipulate (sic) prices of interest rates and stocks to benefit corporations and the wealthy while they feast on exorbitantly priced gluten-free pasta and range-free chicken at Whole Foods, or if even more fortunate, pursue high rise New York condos and private jets at Teterboro. It’s a wonderful life for the 1% and a Xanax existence for the 99. But who’s looking – or counting – even at the ballot box. November 2016 will not change a thing – 8 years of Hillary or 8 years of a non-Hillary. Same difference. Central bankers, Superpacs, and K street lobbyists are in control. Instead of cake, the 49.5% (males) will just have to chomp on their Carl’s Jr. hamburger and dream of a night with 23-year-old Kate Upton lookalikes that show them how to eat it during Super Bowl commercials. And if that’s too sexist, then Carl’s is substituting six-pack hunks instead of full-breasted models to appease the other 49.5% (females). It’s a Xanax society. We love it.

The New York Public Library has released nearly 200,000 public-domain items from its special collections. Check out the home page here.  Some of my favorite collections are those of the so-called cigarette cards : trade cards issued by tobacco manufacturers to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise cigarette brands.  

The series ‘This Age of Power & Wonder’ must have been issued in South Africa, since the cards have both English and Afrikaans on the back of the card !  I just do not recall ever seeing cigarette cards in South Africa when I was growing up.

News came in on Wednesday night of a second circuit-breaker induced trading halt on the Chinese stock exchange on Thursday, with the index down 7% for a second time this week.   Some people say the circuit-breakers are counter-productive, and that the stock market should be left to its own devices, to find a bottom.   And what will happen on Friday? Will the circuit-breakers halt trading for a third time?  We will all have to wait and see.  And not panic. As Steve Mollman and Jennifer Timmons note in this article : in China’s volatile market a 5% drop or jump isn’t uncommon in a normal trading day.  In the USA we say the market is ‘sharply down’ when it is down 2%.

I promise this is the last picture of my Australia/ Japan souvenirs.  I had Doraemon from a previous trip : the enduring robotic cat manga comic character originally published in 1969 in Japan.   The koala does not have a name (maybe Bernie?*), and I found it in a souvenir store in Mandurah.

*In honor of Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders

I learned on Sunday night that I would not have to travel to California early Monday morning. (Yay!).  I get to work from home.  And on Monday night I thought the 2016 Australian Open tennis tournament had started, but I see it starts only on Jan 18.  So I will have to be patient to see if either of the former World No 1’s Roger Federer or Australian Lleyton Hewitt, both aged 34, can notch up one Grand Slam win for the history books.   I for one, root for Federer.  Check out the tribute written for the New York Times in 2006 by David Foster Wallace. It gives me goosebumps to read it.

Part of the joy of coming home from a long trip to new places for me it to unpack and ‘discover’ the little souvenirs that I had collected everywhere I had been.  So may I present out of my suitcase – and from the Akihabara store in Tokyo – some ‘spark dolls’ from the Ultra Monster series. These are monsters that battle with superhero Ultraman.  From Wikipedia : Ultraman (ウルトラマン) is a Japanese live-action television series that first aired in 1966. Ultraman ultimately became a major pop culture phenomenon in Japan. The show’s success spawned dozens of sequels, spin-offs, imitators, parodies and remakes.

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge across the Pearl River Delta has been 30 years in the making.  ‘When completed, the 42km-long Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge will be one of the longest bridges above water in the world, constructed with the mission to speed up integration of cities in the Pearl River Delta. Will it be worth its staggering cost?‘ asks the South China Morning Post in a November 19 report.  Here is a link.

Alright!  It is almost time to kick 2015 – the-year-that-was – out the back door here in the far eastern time zones of the globe.  Sydney is three hours ahead of Perth still, so it will be 2016 in that part of Australia by the time I board my flight tonight to start heading back to the USA.  I am actually making a stop in Hong Kong again, and then I will overnight in Tokyo on New Year’s Day evening before heading home.

Hmm. A good thing I read this on Monday night we had returned from our little swim at Rottnest Island. (Rotto is shorthand for Rottnest Island).  There are about 12 shark attacks recorded on average per year on Australian beaches.   This year has seen 33 attacks with 2 fatalities.

We checked out the Perth Mint on Sunday.  (I love shiny coins). The Perth Mint was established in 1899, the last of three Australian colonial branches of the United Kingdom’s Royal Mint – after the now-defunct Sydney Mint and Melbourne Mint. (Yes, there was a gold rush to Western Australia as well; several, actually, with the discovery of alluvial gold at Kalgoorlie in 1893 the most significant).

The tour of the Mint features a display of the largest gold coin in the world : 80 cm (31 in) in diameter and 12 cm (4.7 in) thick, and made of 1,012 kg (2,231 lb) of 99.99% pure gold.  The coin’s face value is A$ 1 million, but the bullion in it is actually worth some A$53.5 million.   (No pictures were allowed inside the Mint, but here is a link to a picture of it).

Merry Christmas!  Yes, there are a few Santas, snowmen and sleighs on the lawns here in Perth as well (the picture is from our drive around the neighborhood last night).