China's largest denomination is 100 yuan ($15) ...

AOK - A quick and (to me) fascinating account of some of the results and reasons for China's largest currency bill being less than $20-equivalent. If we did that here in North America we'd have more muggings, but then of course we don't consider robbery a capital offense. Hey, that's got to have some deterrent effect.  

Ugly Feedback Cycles- Are Europe's Solvency II insurer regs driving bond yield lower?

AOK - I always find these issues intriguing - where well-minded constraints are introduced into a dynamic system in an attempt to achieve a straight-line first-order effect, but end up going horribly wrong in the reality of a multi-player environment with response lags and feedback issues. Let's stay tuned to see how this one evolves ...

UNESCO declares Mexican cuisine - Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

AOK - The first? Before France? Nobody likes a Romany-expelling bigot ('coz they're dark & mysterious & proud and tell fortunes and all that. The Romany, not the bigot, although thinking about it some more ...)  and you end up getting it jammed back in all kinds of ways, like having jalapenos beat foie gras to the "heritage" cup ...

A trio of articles on Asia's debt markets

AOK - Bill, I think you're totally spot on to get on top of this issue; Asia's capital markets are evolving rapidly and capturing an opportunity to draw in global investment allocation for both credit diversification and off the relative strong economic growth stories. The larger longer-term opportunity is for bond issuance into the deep East Asian saving pools, although that will require the development of effective intermediaries to deliver investment services to the middle classes. Don't think the Asian banks will like this much though, they love having monstrous deposit pools to deploy into corporate loans that can be leveraged into lucrative relationships. Too bad ... 

Mexico issues $1bn 100-year USD bond into strong demand

AOK - amazing sign of the appetite, nay hunger, for yield and for   developing economy exposures; Brazil's so damn sexy these days I bet they could have done $10bn at sub 6%. Watch for Colombia, Chile or Peru to take up the challenge, they are all darlings these days too.