Tell me Trump aint a stable genius: with food inflation + asset deflation, "with a few more nudges Trump could win the China trade war before 2020" https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-09/china-faces-worst-both-worlds-ppi-deflation-arrives-while-food-inflation-soars As if China did not have its hands full with a trade war, a plunging yuan and growing civil unrest in Hong Kong, which is fast becoming the potential epicenter for the next global crisis (and which Steve "The Big Short" Eisman thinks is the next black swan), it now also has deflation to worry about at a time when its ability to boost liquidity in the system is severely limited... or maybe it's surging inflation. On Friday, China's National Bureau of Statistics reported that Producer Price Index, i.e. factory prices, fell 0.3% in July from a year ago, missing the modest 0.1% decline expected by analysts. This was the first annual decline in China's PPI in three years - since August 2016 - and just like back then, was largely the result of tumbling commodity prices which in turn depressed both manufacturing and raw material goods prices. And with oil sliding, and iron ore especially plunging, not to mention the whole trade war thing, it does not seems like a rebound here is imminent at all.  Worse, since PPI is closely linked to corporate profitability, the decline suggests that China is badly lagging in the credit impulse arena despite having started off 2019 with a bang and some of the biggest increases in Total Social Financing on record. So what's the big deal: China has always been able to boost inflation, all it had to do was turn on the credit spigot and inject a few trillion in new bank and shadow loans into the economy. Well, maybe in the past this was the case, but this time it will have a big headache, because even as PPI declined for the first time in three years, consumer prices jumped 2.8%, and coming in hotter than the 2.7% expected. This was tied for the highest annual headline inflation since February 2018, and before that one would have to go all the way to 2013 to find a hotter CPI print. more in the ZH link