Dramatic Irony? The FT “Nods”

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,

Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream

 

If you read this blog, you generally detect a strong admiration for the FT.

But like Homer sometimes the FT nods.

Today’s (17 September) Lex had this bon mot to lead off its column.

China’s recent push to regulate the country’s fastest growing sectors begs the question of whether the market is still investable.

“Still investable”????

Given the legal and political issues with investments in the PRC—e.g., Peking University Founder Group bonds, Evergrande Group, and stock investments via VIEs-- I’d argue there is a strong case that the PRC market was never “investable” if that term is used in a normative rather than descriptive sense.

September 13 the FT ran an article today about the crackdown of South Korea’s Financial Services Commission on digital currency exchanges in the RoK. Some US$2.6 billion in losses were expected for wise investors in this imagined asset class.

Industry data showed that digital coins other than bitcoin made up about 90 per cent of South Korean crypto trading, highlighting the market’s highly speculative nature.

Isn’t investing in sh*tcoins highly speculative regardless of their provenance?

Or in other words is jumping from the top floor of the Lotte World Tower more deadly than jumping from the top floor of the Parc 1?

I hold that statistically the results are likely to be the same.