• Japanese PM Suga resigned: Yoshihide Suga announced that he would resign as Japan’s prime minister to focus fully on dealing with COVID-19.

• Chinese crackdown on negative news: The Chinese government has begun a two-month campaign to take action against those who “bad-mouth China’s financial markets and falsely interpret domestic policies and economic data”. This might put analysts’ credibility into question since they will be forced to lean bullish.

• Beijing Stock Exchange: Xi Jinping announced plans to set up a stock exchange in Beijing to compete with those in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

• Potential Evergrande bankruptcy: Creditors demand immediate repayment of their loans to China Evergrande, the world’s most indebted company. I wrote about Evergrande on VIC a few years ago here.

• Indonesian QE: Bank Indonesia is starting to monetise US$31bn worth of government debt. It remains to be seen how this will affect the US Dollar / Rupiah exchange rate.

Company-specific reports

($ = behind a paywall)

• I wrote a deep-dive on a Hong Kong small-cap COVID-19 recovery bet with a strong balance sheet (SEHK: ? — <US$200 million) ($)

• I wrote another report weighing the bull and bear cases for Japanese electronics giant Sony (TSE: 6758 — US$134 billion)

• Daniel Tabbush on Thai bank TISCO Financial (SET: TISCO — US$2.3 billion)

• Choivo Capital on Cambodian casino operator Nagacorp (SEHK: 3918 — US$3.2 billion). Note the recent insider buying.

• Patches AKF Substack on PAX Global Technology (SEHK: 327 — US$1.5 billion)

Long-form writing

(estimated reading time) ($ = behind a paywall)

• Swen Lorenz was kind enough to feature Asian Century Stocks as “a blog to watch” on his website (4 mins)

• Wickhams Hill’s Under the Radar report dated 4 September 2021 (15 mins)

• Aswath Damodaran on the ongoing crackdown on Chinese tech stocks (20 mins)

• Another George Soros op-ed on China, this time in the Financial Times (4 mins)

• Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff: Back to the 1970s style stagflation? (5 mins)

• Nikkei comparing Xi’s recent policies to those of Mao in the 1950s (4 mins) ($)

• Nikkei on Japan’s first hostile takeover by a hedge fund ever (4 mins) ($)

Podcasts and videos

• Bank analyst Daniel Tabbush on Asian banking stocks (47 mins)

• Smartkarma’s Henry Soediarko on his favourite sectors in Indonesia (37 mins)

• China Tech Investor interviewing Michael Norris on Kuaishou, Tencent and Xiaomi’s earnings (1:16 hours)

• Adam Tooze and Matt Klein on China’s economic history (1:21 hours)

• Grizzly Research’s Siegfried Eggert on Chinese frauds (1:00 hours)

• Historian William Dalrymple on the lessons from Afghanistan (58 mins)

Chart of the week – China, Taiwan and Thailand now the biggest underweight in investor portfolios

Thanks for reading, and I wish you a great week ahead!

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