Yellen Still Mum on Bubbles....Dominoes Maybe???

In Chinese Property, Smart Players Are Selling

The Tycoon Li Ka-shing Unloads Projects in Shanghai, Guangzhou; Richard Li Sells in Beijing

Since September, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, widely considered Asia's richest man, has sold office and shopping-mall projects in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou. His son, businessman Richard Li, sold a prime piece of real estate, a mixed-use complex in Beijing's Sanlitun shopping district, for US$928 million in early April.

Massive soybean defaults loom as China buyers play hard-ball: top buyer

(Reuters) - Chinese buyers may default on a further 1.2 million metric tons (1.32 million tons) of soybeans worth about $900 million being shipped from the United States and South America, to avoid incurring huge losses in a depressed local market, the country's top soy buyer said. 

The hard-line approach taken by Chinese buyers raises the possibility that more cargoes could be dumped into the market, after buyers walked away from at least 500,000 tonnes of shipments in recent weeks. 

"Most of the cargoes were delivered by the seller before receiving letters-of-credit and buyers are unwilling to pay now because they will suffer massive losses," said Shao, speaking from a hotel suite he uses when in Rizhao in this eastern province. 

"If buyers cannot resolve the issue, they may also cancel future shipments."

China Says One-Fifth of Its Farmland Is Polluted

Nearly one-fifth of China's farmland is polluted, mostly from yearslong accumulations of toxins from factories, mining and agriculture, the government said, raising sharp concerns about the country's food safety after years of unbridled industrialization. 

Results of a nationwide survey of soil samples taken from 2005 through last year, and announced late Thursday, showed contamination in 16.1 percent of the country's soil overall and 19.4 percent of its arable land. 

More than 80 percent of the pollution is the result of inorganic toxins, with the top three contaminants identified as cadmium, nickel and arsenic, according results of the investigation jointly announced by China's Environmental Protection Ministry and its Land and Resources Ministry.

 Einhorn Shorting Tech as ‘Cool Kid’ Stocks Show Bubble

“There is a clear consensus that we are witnessing our second tech bubble in 15 years,” the New York-based firm said in a quarterly letter to clients today. 

Greenlight said that companies it’s betting against may fall by at least 90 percent “if and when the market reapplies traditional valuations,” according to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News. 

The Nascent Junk Debt Bubble

One of the obvious effects of endless zero-percent interest rates and QE has been the chase for yield. This has allowed a great many borrowers to tap the credit markets and it has encouraged a a new boom of covenant-light lending (meaning lesser protections for hungry creditors) as well as a jump in junk bond issuance.

French company does biggest junk bond sale ever

A French telecommunications company just pulled off the largest sale of junk bonds in history. 

It's the latest indication of how strong the appetite for high-yield bonds is. 

Numericable (NUM.PA), which provides cable and internet service in France and other European markets, sold a record amount of high-yield bonds Wednesday with some priced in dollars and others in euros. 

It's sold $7.78 billon and €2.25 billion in notes that yield 5% or more, according to a statement from Altice, the multinational telecom group that owns Numericable.

At the same time, Altice issued $2.9 billion and €2.1 billion in bonds that yield more than 7%.

Yellen Still Mum on Bubbles

But as if to appease investors angered that the easy-money spigot is no longer flowing quite as freely, central bankers -- newly-installed Fed Chair Janet Yellen most prominently -- have taken pains to reassure markets that the Fed will remain accommodative long after the bond purchase program known as quantitative easing expires, probably later this year. 

The danger is that those repeated reassurances will, unintentionally perhaps, encourage the sort of risky behavior among investors that led to past asset bubbles, ie., tech stocks in the late 1990s and housing in the mid-2000s.

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