The Stalwart

Food For Singles

Kind of odd, apparently in China there's a brand of food specifically geared towards single adults. It seems they're food products that will last a long time in the refrigerator of a single bachelor.

Hard to imagine a brand so open with such a tack here, although I suspect some companies would do similar stuff in a subtle manner.

China Reverses Course On Whether It Wants Stocks To Be Up Or Down

Remember last year, when Chinese officials were worried about their overheating market? Apparently they've decided that overcooling is now the biggest danger. The Shanghai market has soared on news that the government there has reduced a per-transaction tax on trading stock. Cutting taxes on stock trading is probably a smart idea, but blatantly basing policy on whether you want stocks to be up or down, sounds like a recipe for disaster (note: US regulators might want to consider that same lesson).

Price Per Capita In China

A very, very true vent from Long or Short Capital on buying China stocks:

So when I ask you why I should pay 50x earnings for this company, it’s singularly unhelpful to start off by saying: “Did you know there are A BILLION PEOPLE IN CHINA?” It doesn’t make me want to buy the stock, it makes me want to punch you in the mouth or “decouple” your head from your torso.

I’ll tell you what China also has. A BILLION POOR PEOPLE.

Dang

Via CrossingWallStreet a killer headline:

"Stock" beats "sex" in Google China keyword searches

Perverts.

The Slow Transition To Democracy

Hong Kong to Elect Leader in 2017 - WSJ

"You know, you sound a lot like you're from Kowloon Bay as opposed to Hong Kong."

"I was born in Kowloon Bay!"

For decades, this city's famous skyscrapers have all been jammed together in a district of Hong Kong Island known as Central.

Across the narrow harbor from the island, the city's mainland portion, called Kowloon -- a sort of New Jersey to Central's Manhattan -- has stayed off the radar for financial firms, despite being a five-minute ferry ride away...

Chinese Art Factories, Wow!

In the latest issue of Reason magazine (not online), which came last week, there was a small piece about the art factories of Dafen, China, where laborers are paid to churn out perfect replicas of famous oil paintings, sometimes up to 30 per day. Here's a Spiegel Online piece I found on the subject from last year:

Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.

A giant hand raises an impressive paintbrush into the sky at the entrance to the art village. The bronze sculpture outside the gates of Dafen in southern China leaves no visitor in doubt as to what the people do here. The "village" is in fact a modern suburb of Shenzhen, a city with 10 million inhabitants northeast of Hong Kong, and it has achieved unexpected fame and relative prosperity. But the city's ostentatiously advertized success has little to do with creativity: It's based on the reproduction of famous artworks on an industrial scale.

Alas, even some of the industry's progenitor's are feeling the pinch of cutthroat competition:

Huang Jiang remembers the time when Dafen was really just a village. He came here as the first art-producing entrepreneur 17 years ago. He worked as an errand boy in Hong Kong before he started copying famous art works. Then he crossed the border into China, resolved to open up the first workshop in what was then still a no-man's land. Wages and rent were low, and the port of Hong Kong was close by. "When I arrived in 1989, there was nothing here besides dirt roads and bamboo," the now 60-year-old businessman remembers. "It was like Siberia for factory owners."

Huang has three identical, gold-colored busts of himself standing in his office. They remind him of better days -- the 1990s, when his business was at the peak of its development. Once he produced 50,000 paintings in a month and a half for Wal-Mart, the US retail giant. He earned as much as €200,000 a year ($256,000) -- a fortune in China. Today the roughly 40 painters he employs earn him only five-digit sums.

Personally, I'd love to get my hands on an oil painted replica Van Gogh, assuming it looked decent, if it only set me back a couple of bucks. Then again, I recently found myself at a party talking to two painters, telling them my theory that the ultimate test of a given painting was how well it resembled the image being painted. Being avant garde artists themselves, they were stunned at my old fashioned attitude. Of course, for these painting, how true they are to the original, is certainly the ultimate test.

According to Wikipedia, the art factories take commissions. I recall liking much of the art from the Russia! exhibit at the Guggenheim in 2005. Perhaps I can place an order through alibaba.com.

 

The Next Hot China IPO?

There's an unbelievable amount of equity coming to the public markets in China these days. Everyone knows that though. Anyway, here's the latest I've come across. China Quanjude (Group) Co Ltd, a popular Peking Duck chain:

China Quanjude (Group) Co Ltd, a famous Peking roast duck restaurant chain, kicked off its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday.

According to its public notice, the company plans to issue up to 36 million shares on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and the preliminary IPO price inquiry will start on October 29 and end on October 31.

Quanjude plans to raise at least 380 million yuan. Of the total, 217.96 million yuan will be used to remodel two chain restaurants and set up five chain stores and one hotel.

And of course:

State-controlled companies hold 69.45 percent stake of Quanjude, of which Beijing Capital Tourism Group holds a 65.47 percent stake.

Maybe it'll trade like Krispy Kreme did when it first launched went public during the bubble.

Is Starbucks Telling Us Something About Japan's Economy?

Starbucks (NSDQ:SBUX) has hiked its Japanese prices for the first time in 10 years. On that note, how have the Japanese Big Macs prices been trending? Well perhaps McDonald's (NYSE:MCD) was ahead of the curve, they did a major price increase back in 2003.

TOKYO, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Starbucks Coffee Japan will raise beverage prices by up to 40 yen (34 U.S. cents) a cup from next month, its first price hike since the specialty coffee shop chain opened a store in the country 10 years ago.

The planned price hike comes at a time when an improvement in the country's economy and better wage conditions are encouraging consumers to spend more. Japan's economy has overcome seven years of deflation and is set to log the longest expansion of the postwar era. Starbucks Coffee Japan, owned 40 percent by Starbucks Corp. of the United States, said on Tuesday it would increase prices of its drinks such as cappuccinos and brewed coffee by 20-40 yen from Nov. 8 to fund future investment in stores and a possible rise in costs.

A cup of brewed coffee in a small cup will be priced at 280 yen ($2.35), up from 260 yen. The company will keep prices of food, coffee beans and other goods unchanged.

GDP Nuked

Hilarious headline from The Onion we found at about 2AM. Had us laughing pretty hard.

N. Korea Detonates 40 Years of GDP
Remains of Country's Economy Sent Deep Into Earth's Core

PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA—A press release issued by the state-run Korean Central News Agency Monday confirmed that the Oct. 9 underground nuclear test in North Korea's Yanggang province successfully exploded the communist nation's total gross domestic product for the past four decades. ...

"A nuclear device that size explodes with the force of 10 to 15 tons of TNT, or a moderately sized economic boom," said Ronald Shimokawa, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The detonation most likely sent the burning, liquified remains of North Korea's economy deep into the Earth's core." ...

"This fraction-of-a-second blast is what I, and my parents before me, have given up everything to achieve," said tractor driver Chin Lee-Park, whose machine was cannibalized for bomb derrick parts in 1997. ...

The North Korean government has long been suspected of building up a clandestine stockpile of capital, evidenced by their tendency to shut down national programs that provide its citizens with food, clothing, medicine, shelter, transportation, water, sanitation, education, living wages, and means of communication. A North Korean diplomat defended the decision, saying that citizens "need to make certain sacrifices so their country can afford the basic human right of national security."

Sadly, this piece speaks the truth.