The World is just so fluid and fast moving and in fact the velocity makes me plain dizzy. Lets start with what CNN's Stephen Collinson headlined Trump's Hanoi Hail Mary failed to score. This was of course the big set piece in Hanoi.
Kim was surely counting on President Trump being a soft touch because after all at the very moment they were sitting down for a chat, Michael Cohen [The erstwhile Consiglieri] was opening with the following in front of the House Oversight Committee:
“He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat,” Cohen said in testimony that outlined everything from Trump’s alleged involvement in hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels to his purported knowledge of Roger Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks.
The President was at risk of being seen as a straw man.
The Indian sub-continent entered unprecedented territory, we witnessed the first tit-for-tat air strikes between India and Pakistan since the 1971 war. The first casualty in any war is the truth. Planes were shot down, an Indian airforce pilot wing commander Abhinandan who spots the most compelling handle-bar moustache I have ever seen was captured and then released. The Indian army said they killed hundreds of militants in their attack but has provided no evidence and Pakistan is suing the Indians for ''eco-terrorism''. Of course, Narendra Modi is up against an election and his entire political raison d'être has been built on the basis of Make India great again. He cannot back down or it will be a Jimmy Carter type moment. On the other side, we have a neophyte Prime Minister Imran Khan who has displayed a very deft touch.
"History tells us that wars are full of miscalculation." he said.
''We in India may not like this, but in terms of pure optics, @ImranKhanPTI at the moment is winning the day by taking the moral high ground'' said @sardesairajdeep
''Kashmir is potentially the most dangerous place on earth, the flash-point for nuclear war'' Arundhati Roy wrote in Huffington Post.
You would have thought that gold which is a geopolitical proxy would have gone nuclear and the fact that it didn't is an interesting price signal. India has withdrawn MFN status from Pakistan and therefore, Pakistan will surely be a bigger buyer of Kenyan tea.
“Pakistan imports around 65-70 million kg of tea from Kenya annually and this is bound to increase. This was reflected in the price movement. Kenyan teas rose by ₹12-15 a kg today,” said Dipa Shah, chairman of The South India Tea Exporters Association.
These might be salad days for the tea crew like it once was for the coffee kings when we were coffee kingpins in the 1970s when Brazil's coffee crop was knocked out by a frost.
President Buhari won the election in Nigeria. The turnout was 36 per cent compared to about 45 per cent last time. The Stock Market is not enamoured with the idea of more ''baba go Slow'' economics and slumped on the news.
Firstly, the worst performing currency in the world in 2019 is the Ghana Cedi which has retreated about -12.6% year to date.
“The performance of the cedi doesn’t correlate with the fundamentals,” Opata said in a phone interview from the nation’s capital, Accra.
in Tanzania, the Shilling slumped to an all time low. The Citizen was shuttered for a week for writing a story about the same. The Bank of Tanzania shuttered forex bureus after conducting unannounced inspections. The Tanzanian Shilling is a continuous real time vote on the state of Tanzania and the instinct to switch it off is entirely a fool's errand. The risk of an asymmetric down side move is sky high now.
Meanwhile the Kenya Shilling crossed the psychologically important 100.00 mark last week. We underestimate the regional safe haven status of the currency and I have noticed that these downside moves in the Tanzanian Shilling are being mirrored by the strengthening of the Kenya Shilling. GOK appears to be inclining towards heavier issuance in the Kenya Shilling with a tax free infrastructure bond slated for sale. If this is the thinking, then I expect the Shilling to strengthen further as Kenya taps offshore funds. The charts signal a move as far as 92.00 but that might be too bold.