Monday, March 31, 2014

Irene Fernandez

It takes a generous heart and tons of passion laced with compassion to do what Irene Fernandez did. Who did she did all these for? The normal Malaysians going about their daily lives probably not even realising the sacrifice and deeds of Irene. She did it for the country, the oppressed, the marginalised. She also did it for future Malaysians, the young ones, that the road they shall travel will be 'smoother' and less prejudiced. It is with people like Irene that we live in hope, for a better tomorrow, that the world is not as callous. A true Malaysian. As we the general public benefited knowingly or unknowingly, we must salute those left behind more than a legacy.



Wikipedia:  Irene Fernandez (1946-2014) is a Malaysian human rights activist. She is a PKR supreme council member [1] and the director and co-founder of the non-governmental organization Tenaganita, which promotes the rights of migrant workers and other oppressed and poor people in Malaysia.

In 1995, Irene Fernandez published a report on the living conditions of the migrant workers entitled "Abuse, Torture and Dehumanised Conditions of Migrant Workers in Detention Centres".[2] The report was based in part on information given to her by Steven Gan and a team of reporters from The Sun, who had uncovered evidence that 59 inmates, primarily Bangladeshis, had died in the Semenyih immigration detention camp of the preventable diseases typhoid and beriberi.[3][4] When Gan and his colleagues were blocked by Sun editors from printing the report in the paper, they passed it to Fernandez.[5]

She was arrested in 1996 and charged with 'maliciously publishing false news'.[5] After seven years of trial, she was found guilty in 2003 and convicted to one year's imprisonment. Released on bail pending her appeal, her passport was held by the courts, and as a convicted criminal, she was barred from standing as parliamentary candidate in the 2004 Malaysian elections.

In 2005, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "her outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women and abuses of migrant and poor workers".[6]

Irene Fernandez's appeal at the High Court resumed on 28 October 2008. On 24 November 2008, Justice Mohd Apandi Ali overturned her earlier conviction and acquitted her, ending the thirteen-year case.[7][8]

Monday, March 24, 2014

MSNBC Rightly Blasts CNN & Fox News

Well Fox News is not even news, its more like propaganda really, ... just consider Murdoch's speculative tweets, that tells you a lot about the way he runs his papers and media empire .... but CNN as well?? ... its going down the tubes, c'mon KL is not part of Indonesia. If you are not sure, CNN should not be sending you to cover Asia. If I do not know the difference between the Balkans and the Baltics ... would CNN send me to cover Eastern Europe???

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Of course the lack of information regarding the flight hasn’t stopped outlets like CNN and Fox News from spending an inordinate amount of time reporting on the tragedy. It is disaster porn in the form of conspiracy theories. Rather than focusing on closure for grieving families, the search has taken on Hollywood-like proportions.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has had enough. Watch as he calls out CNN and Fox News for using “boogeyman” scare tactics:

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Get Your Next Financial Crisis Here ......

Easily the best analytical piece of writing on China's economic problems I have come across. Its long but fun to read and contains a lot of investing nuggets. All you need to know about the next financial crisis, when ... it has already started, newsflow out of HK has it that Chinese mainland owners are busy selling their properties in HK (as they are most liquid), the squeeze is already beginning in China.

A Front-Row Seat
By Worth Wray

Before I teamed up with John last July, I worked as the portfolio strategist for an $18 billion money manager in Houston, TX that, among its other businesses, co-managed (with an elite team of investors from the university endowment world) one of the largest registered funds of funds in the United States.

For a bright-eyed kid from South Louisiana, it was a life-changing experience. I had a front-row seat for every investment decision in a multi-billion-dollar portfolio for almost five years; and along with my colleagues and mentors in Texas, North Carolina, New York, Shanghai, and Singapore, I had the chance to meet and interact with a long list of the most sought-after hedge fund, private equity, and venture capital teams. I often found myself in the same room with honest-to-god legends like Kyle Bass, John Paulson, JC Flowers, and Ken Griffin … and I forged lasting some friendships with their portfolio managers and analysts. 

As you can imagine, the information flow was addictive. I spent thousands of hours poring over manager letters from six continents, doing my best to connect the global macro dots ahead of the markets and coming up with question after question for everyone who would return my calls. That experience plugged me in to an enduring network of truly independent thinkers, forced me to see the world from an entirely different perspective, and put me in an ideal position to figure out what it takes to navigate the unprecedented (not to say strange) investment challenges posed by a “Code Red” world.

Sometimes, combing through a mountain of manager letters felt like reading the newspaper years in advance. I remember watching with amazement as a free-thinking global macro investor named Mark Hart made a fortune for his investors by shorting US subprime mortgages and then shifted his focus to what he argued would be the next shoe to drop – a series of sovereign defaults across the Eurozone.

Mark explained how the launch of a common currency had allowed historically riskier borrowers like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and France to issue sovereign debt for the same borrowing cost as Germany did… without any kind of fiscal union to justify the common rates. The resulting debt splurge led to a big increase in fiscal debts, drove an unwarranted rise in unit labor costs across the southern Eurozone, and essentially activated a ticking time bomb at the very foundations of the euro system. It seemed obvious that rates would eventually diverge to reflect the relative credit risks of the borrowers, but the market didn’t seem to care until it got very bad news from Athens. We all know what happened next.

Just as Mark and his team at Corriente Advisors had predicted, spreads blew out in Greece, then in Ireland, then in Portugal, then in Spain… and it now appears that Italy and France are veering toward a similar fate. When the euro crisis finally broke out, my colleagues and I were waiting for it, because Mark had already walked us through his playbook for a multi-act global debt drama.

Instead of blowing up in spectacular fashion, the Eurozone crisis has taken far longer to resolve than a lot of investors and economists expected (Mark, John, and myself included); but the euro’s survival thus far has been largely the result of extensive Realpolitik and an increasingly hollow narrative from Mario Draghi and the ECB laying claim to the wherewithal to “do whatever it takes” to preserve the single-currency system. Meanwhile, as Corriente understood, the likelihood of major defaults across the Eurozone rises every day that the ECB does the bare minimum to resist France’s and Italy’s slide toward deflation. It’s not over until the fat lady sings.

The point I am trying to make is that Mark saw the fundamental imbalances behind the global financial crisis in time to launch a dedicated fund in 2006, and he saw the root causes of the ongoing European debt crisis in time to launch a dedicated fund in 2007… precisely because he thinks of the global economy as one interconnected system peppered with a series of unstable and still unresolved debt bubbles. Mark is one of the most forward-thinking investors I have ever met and one of the best in recent decades at spotting the big imbalances that spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

I can’t tell you if he will be right about the next phase of the global debt drama. Predicting the actions and reactions of elected and unelected officials is next to impossible in a Code Red world, but some people have an eye for fundamental imbalances. And since Mark has been largely right in identifying the major debt bubbles that have plagued the world since 2007, John and I can’t comfortably ignore his warning.

As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argued in their still-authoritative history of financial boom and bust over the past eight hundred years, “When an accident is waiting to happen, it eventually does. When countries become too deeply indebted, they are headed for trouble. When debt-fueled asset price explosions seem too good to be true, they probably are.”

The Bubble That Is China
Following his prescient calls on the subprime debacle and the European debt crisis, Mark identified in 2010 another source of instability that he warned could shake the global economy. And it took me by surprise. He warned that China was in the “late stages of an enormous credit bubble,” and he projected that the economic fallout when that bubble burst could be “as extraordinary as China’s economic outperformance over the last decade.”

To my knowledge, Mark Hart and his team at Corriente were the first of many global macro managers to anticipate a hard landing in the People’s Republic of China. Mark argued that the Middle Kingdom would land very hard indeed, popping speculative bubbles in the property and stock markets, sending foreign capital flying out the door, and triggering a rapid collapse in the renminbi … and even if the Chinese government could manage its economy away from a deflationary bust, they would be forced to devalue the renminbi to do so. In other words, Mark saw a much lower renminbi under almost every outcome.
It was a mind-blowing concept to me that the main driver of global growth (at the time) could not only implode but even drag the rest of the world down with it.

I can’t share the original Corriente China presentation with you for legal reasons, but here are a few public notes published by the Telegraph’s Louise Armistead after she attended one of Mark’s presentations in November 2010. 

These may look like obvious observations today, the sort you can find plastered all across the internet, but very few people were actually paying attention four years ago. And the data has only gotten worse since 2010 as rampant credit growth and insidious shadow lending have continued to fuel greater and greater capital misallocation.


In the presentation, which amounts to a devastating attack on the prevailing belief that China is an engine for growth, the financier argues that ‘inappropriately low interest rates and an artificially suppressed exchange rate’ have created dangerous bubbles in sectors including:

Raw materials: Corriente says China has consumed just 65pc of the cement it has produced in the past five years, after exports. The country is currently outputting more steel than the next seven largest producers combined – it now has 200m tons of excess capacity, more that the EU and Japan's total production so far this year.

Property construction: Corriente reckons there is currently an excess of 3.3bn square meters of floor space in the country – yet 200m square metres of new space is being constructed each year.

Property prices: The average price-to-rent ratio of China's eight key cities is 39.4 times – this figure was 22.8 times in America just before its housing crisis. Corriente argues: “Lacking alternative investment options, Chinese corporates, households and government entities have invested excess liquidity in the property markets, driving home prices to unsustainable levels.” The result is that the property is out of reach for the majority of ordinary Chinese.

Banking: As with the credit crisis in the West, the banks’ exposure to the infrastructure credit bubbles isn’t obvious because the debt is held in Local Investment Companies – shell entities which borrow from Chinese banks and invest in fixed assets. Mr Hart reckons that ‘bad loans will equal 98pc of total bank equity if LIC-owned, non-cashflow-producing assets are recognised as non-performing.’

The result is that, rather than being the ‘key engine for global growth’, China is an ‘enormous tail-risk’.


The markets may damn well prove Mark right, along with a host of other managers who either jumped on his bandwagon or reached the same conclusions independently; but it seemed downright crazy in 2010 to think that the main driver of global growth could abruptly become its biggest threat within a few short years.

On a personal note, I obsessed over China’s culture, economy, and political system for years in college and then witnessed the country’s transformation firsthand during my time at Shanghai’s Fudan University in the summer of 2007. 

Then and later, I marveled at China’s strength relative to the developed world and the seemingly invincible central government’s ability to keep the economy chugging along with credit growth and fixed investment while it hoped for the return of its developed-world customers then mired in the Great Recession.

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear … but I had to accept that Mark could be right. He had clearly identified a major imbalance which has continued to worsen over the last few years, and now we are just waiting for the next shoe to drop.


Four years later, Chinese production is slowing in the shadow of a massive credit bubble and in the face of aggressive reforms.

Disappointing investment returns are revealing broad-based capital misallocation; property prices are cooling (relative to other countries); and commodity stockpiles are mounting.

With China’s new policy of allowing defaults (historically, China’s default rate has been 0%), there is a real risk that follow-on events could spin out of control, raising nonperforming loan ratios and sparking a panic as bank capital is significantly eroded.

In the meantime, the renminbi is trading down, most likely due to an intentional effort by the People’s Bank of China to aid in the slow unwinding of leveraged trade finance.

Now the signs of a Chinese slowdown (and thus a global one, as the world is geared to 8% Chinese growth) are clear, and people around the world are meeting uncertainty with emotion. With that in mind, let’s dig into the data that really matters and try to get to the heart of China’s dilemma.

China’s Minsky Moment?

“China is like an elephant riding a bicycle. If it slows down, it could fall off, and then the earth might quake.” – James Kynge, China Shakes the World

After 30 years of sustained economic growth topping 8% and a successful bank cleanup in 2000, the People’s Republic was well on its way to blowing through the “middle income trap” and transitioning to a more advanced consumption-based economy. But then in 2008 the banking crisis in the United States abruptly ushered in a painful era of balance sheet repair across the developed world and delivered a demand shock to emerging markets. Rather than allow the Chinese economy to fall into recession at such an inconvenient time, the Party leadership sprang into action to stimulate demand with its largest fiscal deficit in more than 60 years and to mobilize bank lending with historically low interest rates and enormous liquidity injections.


As you can see in the charts above, China’s total debt-to-GDP (including estimates for shadow banks) grew by roughly 20% per year, from just under 150% in 2008 to nearly than 210% at the end of 2012 … and continued rising in 2013. Even more ominous, corporate debt has soared from 92% in 2008 to 150% today against the expectation that China’s government would always backstop defaults. That makes Chinese corporates the most highly levered in the world and more than twice as levered as US corporates, just as  corporate defaults are happening for the very first time in more than 60 years.



By another measure, China has accounted for more than $15 trillion of the $30 trillion in worldwide credit growth over the last five years, bringing Chinese bank assets to roughly $24 trillion (2.5x Chinese GDP) and prompting London Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard to tweet John and me a short message: “China riding tail of $24 trillion credit tiger. Tiger will eat Maoists.” And to that, I would respond that I hope the tiger doesn’t find its way to France.

Looking further into the debt problem, China is steadily incurring more and more credit for less and less growth – suggesting that the newer debt is less productive because it is being put to unproductive uses – as you can see in Chart 2 above. That explains why many analysts believe China’s official reported nonperforming loan ratio of 1% is more like 11% – or more than 20% of GDP.

Furthermore, China’s incremental capital/output ratio rose from 2.5x in 2007 to almost 5.5x in 2012. That means it takes more than twice as much debt to generate a given improvement in growth as it did before the debt binge began; and as an aside, the interest burden on China’s total debt, at 9.2%, is higher than in the US in 1929 and near the peak interest burden in 2008. Moreover, debt-service costs in China are more than double the total interest burden seen at any time in the last 100 years of US history.



China’s massive debt build-up since 2008 looks like the perfect recipe for a particularly destructive banking crisis; but as George Soros explains, “There are some eerie resemblances with the financial conditions that prevailed in the US in the years preceding the crash of 2008. But there is a significant difference, too. In the US, financial markets tend to dominate politics; in China, the state owns the banks and the bulk of the economy, and the Communist Party controls the state-owned enterprises.”

It will be a difficult balancing act, but China’s ruling elite doesn’t appear to be in denial about its debt problem, as we have come to expect from the United States and the Japan of old. In fact, it seems the new government under President Xi Jinping is intent on popping the domestic debt bubble and allowing widespread defaults rather than continuing to leverage the system into an unmanageable crisis or a Japanese-style stagnation. The trouble is, their efforts may be too little too late to manage a gradual deleveraging from a massive debt bubble. They are about to perform a dive off the high board that has never been attempted, with the whole world watching.

Among the various reforms set forth in last November’s Communist Party Third Plenum, ranging from financial liberalization to a crackdown on corruption and pollution, the greatest challenge will be gradually deleveraging the Chinese economy without throwing growth into a tailspin. Wei Yao and Claire Huang at Societe Generale argue that the Chinese government must approach the deleveraging process in three steps:


The first step is to stall credit growth – especially the growth of risky lending – so that overall leverage rises at a slower pace. In order to achieve this, Beijing has to stick to stringent monetary policy. The market has got a bitter taste of this. Since the beginning of the year, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and financial regulators have issued a slew of policy-tightening measures on local government off-budget borrowing, cross-border arbitrage flows, bank WMPs and the interbank bond market. 

These measures were intended to limit the supply of easy liquidity – mostly from the interbank market – for speculative uses and risky shadow bank lending. In early June, interbank liquidity conditions started to tense up as these measures took effect. The PBoC at first adopted a surprisingly tough stance and held off on liquidity injections, which resulted in unprecedented interest rates spikes. We would agree that this app roach lacks elegance and the central bank could have been more communicative, but it was a strong signal that policymakers disapproved of all the risky lending behaviour plaguing the system. This is nonetheless a difficult stance to maintain when economic growth slows, given that credit growth has been used as a policy tool by the Chinese government to stabilize short-term economic growth.


The second step is to keep rolling over (a majority of) bad debt. This may be a necessary evil. If stalling credit growth caps the upside on economic growth, rolling bad debt should limit the downside, at least in the near term. The purpose is to avoid sparking a series of corporate bankruptcies, and economic growth can also do its part in deleveraging. Particularly in the case of infrastructure debt, keeping existing projects going can help manufacturers’ supply glut from going wider, and some projects, once completed, may eventually generate cash flow.


In addition, an improving global economy is likely to invite a return of export demand.


The third step is to start NPL disposals bit by bit. Many companies in China are probably unable to even support interest payments on their debt. If the financial system were to keep all of them alive, the percentage of financial resources that goes into the efficient part of the economy would only decline. This is essentially the lesson we can learn from Japan’s lost decades – the economy struggled to grow due to the large number of zombie companies in the system. Therefore, China needs to let bad projects fail and failing companies disappear to make space for efficient ones.

(Wei Yao & Claire Huang, “Asian Themes: Deflating China’s credit bubbles.” Societe Generale; September 19, 2013)

If President Xi Jinping, his Politburo comrades, and the People’s Bank of China can work together to slow credit growth, roll over the majority of bad debts, and gradually start disposing of the worst nonperforming loans, they may have a small, but not hopeless, chance of avoiding the difficult choice between a forceful deleveraging and footing the bill to backstop defaults and/or bank failures that could pile up toward 20% of GDP. That increasingly likely scenario would seriously disrupt real GDP growth along with China’s annual budget.



Trouble is, the People’s Bank of China has allowed some pretty wicked cash crunches over the past year. Some say it was an intentional move to discipline the shadow banking system. That scenario scares the hell out of me, because that kind of behavior suggests the Chinese are playing a dangerous game – and not just with their own economy. Interbank rates do not normally bounce from 2% to 12% in a healthy economy.



In the chart below from Bloomberg, it appears that fluctuations in FX flows may explain a lot of the easing and tightening happening in the interbank market. I suspect this is a clear sign that the PBoC may already be losing control.



For all practical purposes, with China’s corporate debt above 150% and total debt above 210%, history suggests that China’s Minsky Moment is quickly approaching. Investors should prepare for the inevitable demand shocks and fall in global growth regardless of the specific outcome. The Chinese government may have the assets to backstop a truly horrific crisis and maintain slow growth in the 2-3% range; but then again, Mark Hart may have the final word.

Four years on, the denouement has clearly taken longer to arrive than Mark expected, but he is still in the market with his Corriente China Opportunities Fund. And he is still betting big against the yuan, which continues to surprise and slide.



With so much of the market expecting one-way appreciation in the RMB/USD – despite a crescendo of warnings of currency volatility from the PBoC – such moves represent a big surprise and may simply be the first steps down.

China’s government finds itself on the exact opposite side of the carry trade now,  and it appears they have a lot to gain by unwinding it – on the order of $200 billion for every 10% devaluation in the CNY/USD. It’s essentially a way to join the currency war and boost exports without appearing to circumvent the free market.

Contrary to what many onlookers believe, the People’s Bank of China and China’s top leadership are probably not willing and possibly not able to defend the currency while also supporting growth in a deleveraging economy. They will have to make a choice, and frankly, they already have an incentive to let the renminbi fall as they attempt to put the right reforms in place to support long-term growth – or face a deflationary nightmare in the uncomfortably near future.

Not many people realize that China has lost a great deal of competitiveness as its real effective exchange rate has risen in recent years.


Source: OECD


This is the same kind of dynamic that made Ireland, Spain, Greece, Italy, France, and others so uncompetitive relative to Germany in the easy-money years leading up to the euro crisis.


Source: JPMorgan, “Guide to the Markets”


American, European, and Japanese politicians will have a hard time making the case for a downward-trending RMB as long as it floats freely. And honestly, the flip side will be difficult to defend. Although many economists believe that China’s abundant reserves, near 50% of GDP, will be enough to stem the tide in the event of capital flight, I don’t believe they are looking at the right data. In light of clearly wasted spending and widespread capital misallocation, GDP is artificially inflated … not to mention that a substantial portion of Chinese reserves may have already been locked up in loans to foreign borrowers. 

M2 is a far better proxy for the capital that can rush out of an economy without warning … and Chinese M2 is now nearly twice the size of GDP. Since outstanding reserves cover less than 35% of M2, capital outflows place more pressure on the currency than most people realize. I wholeheartedly believe the renminbi will fall further over time, albeit with some serious volatility.

The Bigger They Come…
Over the last 50 years, every investment boom coupled with excessive credit growth has ended in a hard landing, from the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, to Japan in 1989, East Asia in 1997, and the United States after both the late-1990s internet bubble and the mid-2000s housing bubble.

The lesson is always the same, and it is hard to avoid. Economic miracles are almost always too good to be true. Broad-based, debt-fueled overinvestment (misallocation of capital) may appear to kick economic growth into overdrive for a while; but eventually disappointing returns and consequent selling lead to investment losses, defaults, and banking panics. And in the cases where foreign capital seeking strong growth in already highly valued assets drives the investment boom, the miracle often ends with capital flight and currency collapse.

John and I talk about China constantly and always reach the same conclusion. We really have no way of knowing whether the country will suffer a modest slowdown or a hard landing, but we both agree with George Soros that “The major uncertainty facing the world today is not the euro but the future direction of China.”

To be clear, China doesn’t have to experience a deep recession in order to disrupt global growth. A slowdown to 2-3% real GDP growth and a corresponding decline in China’s import demand could fire demand shocks across emerging Asian economies like India and Indonesia, commodity producers like Australia and South Africa, and even deteriorating economies in the Eurozone like France and Italy.

The investor’s dilemma is that there is really no way to know what is happening in China today, much less what will happen tomorrow. The primary data is flawed at best, manipulated at worst, and there seem to be a lot of inconsistencies when we compare official data to more concrete measures of economic activity.

Even China’s new premier, Li Keqiang, believes China’s GDP numbers are “man-made” and therefore unreliable, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010. For what it’s worth, that same cable suggests the premier is more interested in measurements like electricity consumption (officially expected to rise by 7% in 2014), rail cargo volumes (officially expected to rise by 2% in 2014), and bank loans (officially expected to stall in 2014) ... which are all showing potential signs of fatigue.

From an investment perspective, China’s predicament can teach us one valuable lesson. The most important risks are often the ones you cannot easily anticipate, and thorough diversification may be your only defense. As the Chinese say, “Precaution averts perils.”


Saturday, March 22, 2014

Tassie Single Malt Wins World's Best Title

Tasmanian distillery Sullivan's Cove has been named the world's best single malt whisky at the World Whiskies Award held on Thursday night in London.
Sullivan's Cove's French Oak Cask variety was judged the global winner, as well as Australia's best, from a high-quality pool of single malt entries. They included Scotland's Bunnahabain, Aberfeldy, Glenkinchie and Glenlivet distilleries, as well as Japanese powerhouse Yamazaki.
Winner: Sullivan's Cove French Oak Cask.
The World Whiskies Award is considered the most prestigious in the world for whisky producers and the manager and part-owner of Sullivan's Cove, Patrick Maguire, said it would put Australia and Tasmania firmly on the world whisky map.

"It's the big one, there are a few big ones in the world such as the Jim Murray Whisky Bible and Liquid Gold awards, but the World Whiskies Award is it, that's the one everybody wants," Maguire said.

"We've won Australia's best, Australasia's best and southern hemisphere's best in the past but to win the overall best whisky globally is incredible stuff.
"It'll really put Sullivan's Cove and Australian whisky on the world map, there'll be a lot of promotion of this in places like Britain and France, so it will really put us on top of the whisky tree."

Judges described the French Oak Cask entry as "light, peppery and intriguing", "a match made in heaven with a smooth buttery feel" and "keeping it simple in a very good way".

Maguire said tasting the Sullivan's Cove entry would have been something different for the judges. "I think what the judges are enjoying with us is that we don't over-process our whiskies and this is something that the bigger distilleries have to do," he said.

"The process of getting it into the bottle is something we do in a slow, old-fashioned way that retains all the natural flavours, colours and the viscosity of the whisky, and that's something the judges don't get the chance to taste all the time.

"With our whiskies, they are that old-fashioned style so that when the judges taste them they do tend to stand out, and that's why we've been consistently winning these awards.

"We're going to stick to our guns and continue on with the old-fashioned hand-bottling way that we do."

Tasmania has a cluster of highly-regarded whisky distilleries which, surprisingly, are better known in other parts of the world than in Australia.
"It's taken Australia a little bit longer to latch onto what we're doing here with Tasmanian whiskies, not just for Sullivan's Cove," Maguire said.

"We've been selling into Europe and Canada for the last six or seven years, and Australia's really only kicked in in the last two years."


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/top-drop/tassie-whisky-named-worlds-best-single-malt-20140321-357lc.html#ixzz2whhv4LeV

Friday, March 21, 2014

Japanese Single Malts Taking Over The World

From Bloomberg:



My first sip of a great Japanese single-malt whisky was back in 2004, when the 18-year-old Yamazaki was first introduced into the U.S. I found its suave smoothness and elegance as sleek as a new Lexus. It had the familiar spicy, caramel-and-honey notes of a luxury single malt from Scotland but with its own exotic appeal from partial aging in Japanese mizunara oak. 

 
Since then, Japan has been quietly scooping up gold medals at world whisky competitions, and in 2012, the 25-year-old Yamazaki beat out 300 of the world’s single malts in an international blind tasting. Now, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Spring 2014 issue, Japanese whisky seems to have reached a tipping point. Half a dozen additional brands have entered the U.S.; an all-Japanese-whisky bar, Mizuwari, has opened in London; and prices of rare bottles have skyrocketed at recent Hong Kong auctions. 

The quest to make world-class whisky in Japan began in 1918, when chemist Masataka Taketsuru journeyed to Scotland to pry out the country’s whisky-making secrets. Upon his return, businessman Shinjiro Torii, founder of what would become beverage giant Suntory Holdings Ltd., hired him to set up Japan’s first serious whisky distillery in Shimamoto. (Suntory announced a deal to purchase Beam Inc., maker of Jim Beam bourbon, in January.)
Suntory's 90-year-old distillery in Shimamoto, Japan. (Photograph: Courtesy of Suntory)
Ten years later, Taketsuru left for a site in snowy, remote Hokkaido prefecture that more closely resembled the terroir of the Scottish Highlands. He built the Yoichi distillery and founded rival whisky empire Nikka Whisky Distilling Co.

Global Recognition

Global recognition and appreciation of Japanese whiskies didn’t come until the 21st century. Many people first learned the country was making whisky from the 2003 Sofia Coppola film “Lost in Translation.” The plot revolves around an aging American actor, played by Bill Murray, who’s been hired by Suntory to star in a TV commercial. In one very funny scene, which showcases Suntory’s crisp Hibiki 17-year-old blend, the commercial’s histrionic director exhorts Murray’s character to look into the camera with “Masterpiece Theatre"–like intensity and declare, ‘‘It’s Suntory time.’’ 
 
Considering there are only seven active single-malt distilleries in Japan, the variety of styles is startling. All share a basic DNA with traditional Scotch: Japanese whisky also starts with malted barley imported from Scotland, because it’s the best and the cheapest. 

And yet there are differences. The Japanese don’t acquire whiskies from other distilleries to make their distinctive blends, the way the Scots do. Instead, each distillery creates its many in-house variations using an array of copper pot stills and wooden barrels. 
 

Coal Fires

The resulting whiskies are more floral, with softer, silkier textures, than those from Scotland. At Nikka’s Yoichi distillery, the pot stills are heated by coal fires, as opposed to steam, which gives their single malts richer, peatier flavors. 

And the Yamazaki distillery’s use of virgin mizunara barrels contributes aromas of temple incense and sandalwood. Climate and landscape are also key flavor influencers. Whiskies produced at higher elevations, such as those at Suntory’s Hakushu distillery in the southern Japanese Alps, are notably clean and crisp, as are those from the Fuji-Gotemba distillery, which uses snowmelt from Mt. Fuji.

Single-Cask Bottles

Part of the growing interest in Japanese whisky, says David Driscoll, a spirits buyer for California’s K&L Wine Merchants, is that ‘‘people crave the new, the unique and the unobtainable.” Among the most-prized collectibles are single-cask bottles from Japan’s storied, now-closed distilleries. 

For instance, U.K.-based Number One Drinks Co. obtained the distribution rights to the remaining 364 casks of Karuizawa. The legendary 1967, with notes of tobacco, sherry, dark chocolate and roasted coffee beans, originally sold in 2009 for $380 but now costs 10 times that, while the 1968 sold at a Bonhams auction in Hong Kong for almost $6,000, far above the high estimate. 
 
Equally rare are Ichiro’s Malt Card whiskies from the shuttered Hanyu distillery, with labels that look like playing cards; a set of 13 brought $12,642 at Bonhams’s November Hong Kong sale. 

Japanese whiskies aren’t just Scotch made in Japan. They embody a different, especially delicate aesthetic, based on harmony and precision. They’re more subtle Zen garden than sturdy Scottish kilt. The top bottles aren’t easy to find, even in Japan, but they’re worth the search.

Top Bottles

Hakushu 12-year-old single malt This fresh, lightly smoky whisky from Suntory’s forest distillery— inside a bird sanctuary 2,200 feet (670 meters) up in the southern Japanese Alps—has notes of green apple and smoky autumn leaves. ($70) 

Hibiki 21-year-old blended whisky This Suntory blend of more than 20 Yamazaki and Hakushu whiskies is perfumed, subtle and sweet, with just the right touch of tartness. ($300) 

Nikka Taketsuru Pure Malt 21-year-old This blended single malt, named for Nikka’s founder, is round and rich, with notes of exotic spices, dried fruit, leather and cocoa and a finish that goes on and on. ($170) 

Yamazaki 25-year-old single malt Judged best Japanese single malt in Whisky Magazine’s 2013 World Whiskies Awards, Suntory’s flagship is bright, smooth, complex and perfectly balanced, with a delicate taste of honey, spiced peaches and coconut. ($1,600) 

Yoichi 15-year-old single malt Bold, concentrated and sweet, this Nikka whisky has notes of nuts, tobacco, bitter chocolate and smoke. ($130)





Saturday, March 15, 2014

Browser War Almost Over ....

How important is the browser, a techie will be able to tell you more I think. That is a foothold for dominance of the internet audience. The browser war has escalated over the past 5 years and it is so easy to see who is winning. The first section captures data for visitor to my site and the browser they use. Over the last 7 years, Internet Explorer still has a small lead cumulatively at 31% followed by Chrome with 25%, Firefox with 21% and Safari 15%.

What is more interesting is to capture the same data for the month of March 2014 alone in the second section.

Mozilla's (Firefox)  income mostly comes from Google- every time someone searches Google using Firefox's search box, they give Mozilla a portion of the ad revenue. That accounts for over 90% of Mozilla's revenue, with the rest being donations (the Mozilla foundation is a registered non-profit). I don't know about Opera.

As far as Chrome on the iPhone, it really wouldn't make a difference. Chrome and Safari are actually the same web browser (Webkit, made by Apple) but with different chromes (the menu bars and toolbars and stuff). That's got nothing to do with AT&T, Apple just wants to maintain control over user experience on the iPhone and that's easier to do if you're using their software.


Really the big result of the browser wars would be the future direction of the Internet. Microsoft would like everyone to be using the Silverlight and other Microsoft technologies for web development because that would mean Microsoft could dictate control of the web- you'd have to buy Microsoft's development tools to make dynamic web programs. Mozilla and Google both want open web standards, such as HTML 5, to dominate because they want everyone to have equal access to the web. Google made their own web browser so that they could focus on application speed- they want web applications to run as well as desktop applications so that they can expand their offerings and get even more people to register for their services. 



Data for
May 2007 - March 2014

Pageviews by Countries

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
Malaysia
9164415
United States
515678
Singapore
469772
Australia
129521
Indonesia
83660
United Kingdom
76989
Hong Kong
52565
Canada
24445
Germany
18393
France
16198

Pageviews by Browsers

EntryPageviews
Internet Explorer
3514082 (31%)
Chrome
2863645 (25%)
Firefox
2377506 (21%)
Safari
1717899 (15%)
Mobile Safari
318274 (2%)
Apple-PubSub
217670 (1%)
Opera
124593 (1%)
Google Desktop
34827 (<1 div="">
Mobile
31027 (<1 div="">
CriOS
18557 (<1 div="">
Image displaying most popular browsers

Pageviews by Operating Systems

EntryPageviews
Windows
8429001 (76%)
iPad
716837 (6%)
iPhone
629751 (5%)
Macintosh
591749 (5%)
Android
448473 (4%)
Linux
101842 (<1 div="">
BlackBerry
56488 (<1 div="">
Other Unix
14422 (<1 div="">
iPod
13895 (<1 div="">
Nokia
6252 (<1 div="">
Image displaying most popular platforms

As you can see, Chrome has won the war decisively going forward. Now they have 40% market share followed by Safari with 25%, Firefox 14% and Internet Explorer has dropped to 12%.

Data For March 2014 alone

Pageviews by Countries

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
Malaysia
131253
United States
10547
Singapore
6330
Australia
2169
Indonesia
2140
United Kingdom
1444
Germany
1154
France
1151
Hong Kong
642
Russia
463

Pageviews by Browsers

EntryPageviews
Chrome
66227 (40%)
Safari
42046 (25%)
Firefox
24667 (14%)
Internet Explorer
20466 (12%)
Mobile Safari
7436 (4%)
Opera
2323 (1%)
CriOS
950 (<1 div="">
Mobile
778 (<1 div="">
chromeframe
301 (<1 div="">
Zite
289 (<1 div="">
Image displaying most popular browsers

Pageviews by Operating Systems

EntryPageviews
Windows
98003 (58%)
iPad
23423 (14%)
Android
18501 (11%)
iPhone
13458 (8%)
Macintosh
9530 (5%)
Linux
2625 (1%)
Other Unix
266 (<1 div="">
BlackBerry
184 (<1 div="">
BB10
178 (<1 div="">
iPod
88 (<1 div="">
Image displaying most popular platforms