Further to the Slog piece of Wednesday, it looks increasingly like the Chinese government is having insuperable problems slowing down its careering economy: The Wall Street Journal today has a piece bemoaning how long everything takes under a totalitarian regime. I suppose the WSJ isn’t really meant to be some kind of human rights charity, but anyway, this is what it opined this morning:

‘Beijing has been slow to pounce, even though food prices are rising at a nearly 12% annual clip and overall inflation hit 5.4% in March, according to numbers released Friday, more than twice the pace of a year ago. The steps it has taken thus far, including last week’s 0.25% interest-rate increase, have been modest….Monetary policy in the world’s second-largest economy involves dueling bureaucracies, secretive committees and a Communist Party whose influence is hidden but pervasive. No single official is in charge, making it nearly impossible for other leading nations to coordinate economic policy with China….’

Yup, it’s tough when you’re a Master of the Universe suddenly confronted by mortals without shareholders. “Who is China’s Bernanke?” asks Beijing economist Yu Yongding, a former central bank adviser. A good question, always assuming you might want one in the first place.

The Slog has been saying for years that Chinese leaders don’t understand Western precepts of capitalism – and vice versa. But rather like the gorilla with the shotgun, in the end they will do what they want at a pace that suits them. And just as the Beijing Godfathers will screw up with adverse effects for the rest of us, so too the Foreign Devil Banking mafia will continue to over-egg every pudding they’re allowed to make.

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Talking of crooks, sorry cooks, Goldman Sachs are back in the soup from which the firm only just emerged. A US Senate probe says Goldman Sachs misled investors selling mortgage-backed investments it knew would fail. This body – the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – spent two years looking at the behaviour of Wall Street banks at the time of the credit crisis. It said Goldman had also misled Congress in a testimony given in 2010. It found “a variety of troubling and sometimes abusive practices”. It said that Goldman marketed four sets of complex mortgage securities to banks and other investors, but failed to tell them the investments were very risky. It said the bank did not mention that it was itself betting that the investments’ value would fall, indicating it sold products to clients it did not believe in backing itself. It said it had found new evidence that showed Goldman’s misleading of investors went beyond the 2007 case on which Goldman settled out of Court for $550 million. It raised doubts about the testimony given last year by a number of Goldman executives. And it felt that the firm had deliberately obstructed the Committee throughout.

Goldman Sachs said they disagreed with the SPECI findings,  but acknowledged that its marketing material had contained “incomplete information”.

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Over the hills and far away, more evidence emerged today that there’s more to the Swiss than an irritating manner. One of the world’s most secretive trading companies – Glencore – announced yesterday that it is to floatthe company during May. Revealed some of its most closely guarded secrets, Glencore admitted that in some sectors, including zinc and copper, it controls more than half of the third party market – that measured as the volumes traded freely outside long-term agreements between suppliers and consumers. Or put another way, Glencore is the world’s biggest monopoly middle-man.

Glencore further disclosed that it controls 45 per cent of the third-party lead market, 38 per cent in alumina, and between 30 and 20 per cent for aluminium, cobalt and thermal coal. It also enjoys what might be called a ‘directionalising’  market share for nickel, ferrochrome, oil and grains.

Unsurprisingly, rivals expressed fears that having even more capital at its disposal would present Glencore with a ‘moral hazard’ in enabling the company to manipulate prices. Shame on those unclean thoughts: don’t you know these guys are Swiss?

I could be wrong, but something tells me the yodellers won’t have much trouble getting this IPO away.

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It’d be bad enough if we punters only had to be wary of banking goforits, price-fixers, silky liars and slow-moving inscrutable folks. But unfortunately, some of the bureaucrats in charge of stuff over there in Europe clearly don’t know how to do any of those things properly. They seem on the whole to be tooth-sucking, spendthrift, shamelessly red-faced Daleks stuck in neutral.

With Greek borrowing costs breaking record highs yesterday, the euro weakened significantly after German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaueble acknowledged that Greece may need a miracle involving loaves and a debt restructuring in the near future. In press interviews, senior ECB Board member Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi said that a debt restructuring would result in the “failure of a large part of Greece’s banking system”, and that consequently the Greek economy would be “on its knees, with devastating effects on social cohesion and the resistance of the country’s democratic system.” Thank God he pulled his punches – but the bit he missed was picked up by Handelsblatt, which dutifully reported the likelihood of Cyprus being dragged into the eurozone’s debt crisis, as its banks depend on the Greek market and their high exposure to Greece’s government bonds – that being a mere 37% of the Cypriot GDP.

Ireland agreed a new, improved version of its bailout conditions. This is alleged to include an increase in the minimum wage as well as reductions in employer insurance and VAT in low paid sectors…but also expected to impose further job cuts. Michael Noonan, Irish Finance Minister, suggested that the deal showed that the EU/IMF were willing to negotiate on “unpopular” areas of the bailout agreement. Observers spent most of the day hunting for the popular bits, but while they were at it Moody’s downgraded Ireland by two notches, leaving its credit rating one notch above junk. Some speculated that his was a result of the new, improved version of its bailout conditions, but Government finance officials were too overcome with joy to comment.

The EU responded by proposing a £7bn increase in next year’s EU budget, and lifting sanctions on the former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa, following his ‘defection’ from the Libyan regime.

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