India is ready to explode in anger

people locking up bankers

Angry mobs are locking in bankers and insulting staff as India’s banks fail to cope with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s purge on the 500 rupee and 1,000 rupee notes.
“Already people who are frustrated are locking branches from outside in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu and abusing staff as enough cash is not available,” CH Venkatachalam, general secretary of the All India Bank Employees’ Association, told Bloomberg.

It's payday

On Thursday, India’s first payday since the currency ban, the rush for cash has made the situation even worse, and bank employees are fearing for their lives after irate customers can't get the cash they need.
Four printing presses across India are working overtime to generate new bills, but the supply has yet to even approach the demand.
On Wednesday, hundreds of angry customers blocked traffic on the highway, damaged vehicles and threw stones at the police when their banks ran out of cash in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In one town, the bank clerks were so frightened that they ran to the nearest police station to escape the irate crowd.

Economy being crushed

Businesses have been crippled, farmers have been unable to buy seeds to plant crops, and people have been denied basic services....
“It’s a typical case where the underprivileged are paying heavily for the financial misdeeds of the privileged class,” said Ashis Nandy, a renowned Indian political psychologist and sociologist. “They are facing massive inconvenience for the failings of a series of governments to curb black money and allowing corruption to become a way of life.”

Mandated patriotism

According to an interim order handed down Wednesday by two justices on India's Supreme Court, movie theaters nationwide must play the country's national anthem before each feature film begins. What's more, the audience members must stand in observance, while an Indian flag is depicted on the big screen and the doors of the theater are temporarily closed to prevent distractions.

Global Bond Rout

35-year bull market is over

The 30-year-old bull market in bonds looks to be ending with a bang.
The Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Total Return Index lost 4 percent in November, the deepest slump since the gauge’s inception in 1990...
Calling an end to the three-decade bond bull market is no longer looking like a fool’s errand: the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates again -- and do so more often than once a year, inflationary expectations are climbing and there are hints global central banks may buy less sovereign debt going forward. Investors pulled $10.7 billion from U.S. bond funds in the two weeks after Trump’s victory, the biggest exodus since 2013’s “taper tantrum,” while American stock indexes jumped to records.
November’s rout wiped a record $1.7 trillion from the global index’s value in a month that saw world equity markets’ capitalization climb $635 billion.

The question is: what will the end of a generation-long bull market do to the largest segment of the enormous derivatives market?

China capital controls

Money flees China

China’s central bank will limit the amount of renminbi that Chinese companies and individuals can remit outside the country, imposing a cap for the first time in more than two decades to stem the yuan’s outflow as the currency plumbs daily lows.
Companies domiciled in China will be limited to net currency outflows equivalent to 30 per cent of the owners’ equity, according to Order No. 306 issued Monday by the People’s Bank of China, a copy of which was obtained by the South China Morning Post.

China curbs gold impors

Some banks with licences have recently had difficulty obtaining approval to import gold, they said — a move tied to China’s attempts to stop a weakening renminbi by tightening outflows of dollars, the banks added.
The hit to gold imports comes as China tightens restrictions on overseas deals by state-owned companies in an effort to limit capital outflows that has seen the renminbi fall to its lowest against the dollar in eight years

America's war in Africa

In Somalia

The escalating American military engagement in Somalia has led the Obama administration to expand the legal scope of the war against Al Qaeda, a move that will strengthen President-elect Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands of Islamist fighters in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.
The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.
The executive branch’s stretching of the 2001 war authorization against the original Al Qaeda to cover other Islamist groups in countries far from Afghanistan — even ones, like the Shabab, that did not exist at the time — has prompted recurring objections from some legal and foreign policy experts.

In Libya

The US Africa Command, AFRICOM, reported yesterday that it had conducted nine airstrikes against ISIS targets in Sirte on Tuesday. These latest hits bring the total number of airstrikes in support of what the US calls ‘‘Operation Odyssey Lightning’’ which began on 1 August to a total of 420 airstrikes.