Breakingviews

Hong Kong’s anti-foreigner property tax may spread

By Peter Thal Larsen

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Hong Kong’s new anti-foreigner property tax may catch on elsewhere. Battling the effects of cheap money and capital flight, the territory’s authorities have slapped a 15 percent stamp duty on buyers without a permanent residents’ card. Though the move will have unintended side effects, its political logic could prove appealing in other urban hotspots.

Review: A practical guide to writing in Chinese

By Katrina Hamlin

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

Mo Yan may have won the Nobel, but in China celebrity blogger Han Han rules online. More than half a billion readers have visited his irreverent blog. He’s also a hit on Sina Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, where his first post attracted 750,000 followers.

China insider exposé is explosive and predictable

By John Foley

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Fix one problem, and along comes another. On the day China expelled disgraced politician Bo Xilai from its parliament, a New York Times investigation alleged that Premier Wen Jiabao’s family controls financial assets worth $2.7 billion. The suggestion is explosive, particularly of a leader who has spoken out about inequality. But it is also mundane, and won’t much change the calculus for investors in the People’s Republic.

To fix U.S. finances requires compromiser-in-chief

By Rob Cox and Daniel Indiviglio
The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.

Who is best suited to be the next compromiser-in-chief? That may be the most important question American voters will have to answer when they head to the polls to elect a new president on Nov. 6. A sweeping, bipartisan agreement to reform the tax code, cut spending and ensure the safety of entitlement programs is an essential precondition for stabilizing the country’s finances and getting the economy back on track.

Mixed messages for Chinese IPO hopefuls

By Wei Gu

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

Chinese IPO hopefuls are getting mixed messages. Foshun Pharmaceutical, whose name means “revival” in Chinese, has raised $500 million in the first Hong Kong offering for three months. At the same time, however, a real estate trust backed by Li Ka-Shing has cancelled its Singapore listing. Despite a market recovery, the summer lull isn’t over yet.

Hong Kong suffers from being small and open

By Andy Mukherjee

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Hong Kong’s dollar peg is straining under the global liquidity glut. The territory’s monetary authority bought U.S. dollars on four separate occasions in the past week to prevent the currency from rising beyond the top of its permitted trading range. But it’s hard to say if abandoning the 29-year-old fixed rate regime would have made it any easier for Hong Kong to cope with money-printing in the West.

Last U.S. debate neglects foreign policy realities

By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The last U.S. presidential debate was an oratorical rendition of Saul Steinberg’s 1976 illustration of the myopic world view from New York. Listening to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spar on Monday night, it would have been easy to forget Europe exists and imagine the Middle East is as big as the African continent and Asia combined. Free trade got short shrift and the global coordination of finance nary a mention. Worse, politically facile China-bashing suggests both men may miss a big opportunity.

China’s liquidity non-problem could turn ugly

By Andy Mukherjee

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

A thin sliver of “ultimate liquidity” is supporting a vast edifice of private-sector debt obligations in China. That structure is unstable.

Japan exporters should fear slowdown, not boycott

By Wayne Arnold

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Squabbles over remote islands have sparked a Chinese backlash against Japanese brands. But China’s slowing economy is having an even bigger impact on Japan’s exports. And while China has toppled the U.S. as Japan’s biggest market, both nations face a common economic enemy in the form of plunging demand from Europe.

Review: The danger of trading machines

By Martin Hutchinson

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

It’s a quarter-century since computerized program trading led to Black Monday on the U.S. stock market. A new and more advanced generation of arcane algorithms now threatens capital markets. That is the lesson of “Dark Pools,” a new book on machine-based equity trading by the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Patterson. The book is a great read – and raises an important question: could the trading machines destroy the capital markets?