Shanghai May Levy 1.5% Property Tax on May 15, Hexun Reports

By Bloomberg News

May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Shanghai’s municipal government may levy a tax of up to 1.5 percent of the value of properties on May 15, Hexun.com reported on its Web site today, citing a developer who declined to reveal his name.

Several Shanghai-based developers have received “hints” that new policies are poised to be issued to cap property prices, and have begun to sell their properties, the Chinese-language news website reported.

--Luo Jun in Shanghai. Editor: Eugene Tang.

1 trillion dollar bailout for Europe

As what CNBC has shown, the bailout package for Europe is about 1 trillion! Does that sound familiar? I remember vaguely about the 700 billion bailout package about 1 year ago in USA and it has lead the market-dollar rally till now.

Anyway, this bailout package has caused the dollar to plunge massively to around S$1.377 which is near the initial FX rate I changed.

Currently with the US markets opened, it was up at 400+ points but right now at 9.49pm, it has only around 260+ points gained for Dow. Quite an exciting night though for the market as we embrace this bailout package..

History was created yesterday

If you stayed and see the US market yesterday, you would have witness history. Probably first time ever, dow plunged to a all time low of -980+ points before bouncing back. Not even lehman's collapse caused such a big fall.

Apparently there's alot of speculation that it was due to error trading. In fact, we can see that if it was an error trade, apparently most of the traders have their trade all computerized nicely to see trigger to domino effect. Once it broke past a certain level, every computer starts to sell, from A to Z! I guess not even any circuit breaker in NYSE could have prevented that auto trigger of selling though.

After this mega mistake, we could learn some good experience on this. I'm very sure alot of panic selling was triggered in various affected counters like P&G, Accenture. Accenture was the scary one though, dropping from $40 to $0.01! If i was holding or trading that, my heart will also fly out!

Recently my work project has cut over, thus I didn't have much time to update the daily market news from our local market, but nevertheless, our market cannot survive this massive plunge and has broken down back to the 2800+ range.

Do take note that we took about 3-4 months to even reach to this stage of closing in to 3000 mark. It took only less than a week to break it down? This feeling of depression seems to be kicking back into the markets, like in the month of end January and close to end 2008.

While the trigger was about Greece again, do take note that the news have mentioned Greece for like the 4th time at least over the past 7-8 months? I vaguely remembered the PIGS were mentioned in Oct 2009 and it caused quite a correction back then. Second time came in around Jan 2010 and in Mar 2010 as well if I remember correctly. This time round, the europe markets has really reacted strongly to the news from Greece and alot of thinking can be derived from this episode.

Greece is only like 1% of GDP in the whole of Europe, why would it cause so much damage to the markets? One being as a country, having a country to so call declare bankrupt is a big thing already. Next, the social unrest that it caused is limitless. Look at the rising riots that are happening in Europe due to this issue. My take is it is going to be a repeat of what the US govt did back then in 2008. Time to bail out the bankrupt countries by printing more money. Look at the Euro; it has plunged to a all time low to the USD. Apparently, most people have flee back to Gold and the dollar for safety havens.

I myself have bought some USD and have an average dollar of S$1.38 against US$1. Right now it is exchanging at around S$1.40 and I am predicting it to hit at least S$1.42 before some pullback occurs. If Europe is not solving this issue, I can see USD strengthening again while investors flee the euro zone.