China

China has granted preliminary approval for 31 Trump trademarks for businesses ranging from hotels and spas to animal training and weather forecasting, reopening a debate about the potential for conflicts of interest under his presidency.

Democrats in Congress were critical of Trump after The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the potentially valuable trademarks had been granted, raising questions of conflict of interest and political favoritism. One senator said the issue "merits investigation." There were also seven trademark applications that were rejected.

Sichuan, a province of China, is transforming into a global Bitcoin mining capital primarily due to its cheap electricity, low population density and cold climate.

China’s southwestern provinces, such as Sichuan, are seeing an exponential growth of Bitcoin mining facilities and centers as companies continue to search for mountainous regions with high altitude to cool down mining equipment without allocating additional resources.

Rows of mining equipment operated continuously over time leads to mounting operational costs. Apart from the space, the cost includes electricity charges for running the mining hardware and the air conditioning units to maintain optimal conditions within the mining centers. If the costs are too high, it will eat into the margins of the Bitcoin miners, rendering the whole operation ineffective.

Two of China’s most widely used bitcoin exchanges have announced that they will suspend bitcoin and litecoin withdrawals for one month effective immediately.

In public posts that showcase the increasingly coordinated nature of exchange policy in the region, both OKCoin and Huobi said on Thursday that the move was a bid to bolster their anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities and prevent "illegal transactions". In the case of OKCoin, only it’s OKCoin.cn portal is affected.

Swiss pesticides and seeds group Syngenta reported 2016 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of $2.66 billion on sales of $12.79 billion.
Analysts polled by Reuters had on average expected EBITDA to fall 5.9 percent to $2.61 billion on sales down 4.2 percent to $12.85 billion. They had expected it to boost its dividend to 11.60 Swiss francs from 11.00

Mystery surrounds the whereabouts of Xiao Jianhua, one of China’s richest men, reportedly taken away from the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong by Chinese police and put into custody in on the mainland, according to media reports.

Mr Xiao is the founder of Beijing-based Tomorrow Group, a well-connected financial services company, and is worth nearly $6 billion ($4.75 billion), according to the Hurun Report, China’s version of the Forbes Rich List.

It’s unclear why Mr Xiao has been targeted. China’s ministry of public security and foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday, a public holiday in China. The Financial Times (FT) said Xiao normally keeps an entourage of female bodyguards but was led away without a scuffle.

Switzerland’s gold exports to China surged to their highest on record in December at 158 tonnes, data from the Swiss customs bureau showed on Thursday, nearly triple the level of the same month a year earlier.

According to Eddie van der Walt as reported on the Bloomberg terminal this morning, total Swiss gold exports surged to 287.6 tons in December (valued at CHF 10.8b), their highest since May 2013 in December, according to data on the website of the Swiss Federal Customs Administration.

Gold exports to China in December “were the highest since at least January 2014” according to Bloomberg. Most of the exports to China are in the form of investment grade gold bars in the one kilogramme gold bar format which is used by Chinese investors, institutions, exchange traded funds (ETF) and indeed the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

BTCC co-founder and CEO Bobby Lee believes that China’s immensely popular cryptocurrency bitcoin will come under regulation in future.
The announcement by Lee comes after PBoC launched an investigation on BTCC, China’s largest bitcoin exchange, along with other leading bitcoin exchanges like Huboi and OkCoin, in the aftermath of the immense price hike in bitcoin at the end of December 2016 and beginning of January 2017.

"The answer is, I don’t know when it will happen but I know it will happen. I have confidence of that because fundamentally I think bitcoin exchanges need to be regulated," said Lee to Business Insider.

The top three Chinese bitcoin exchanges BTCC, OKcoin, and Huobi will be charging trading fees on Tuesday. The announcement comes after the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) began inspecting the exchanges and pledging new oversight. The most vocal company so far has been the BTCC exchange giving details to the public regularly.

“BTCChina, our CNY exchange, will start charging fees for bitcoin and litecoin trading from 12:00 PM (noon) UTC+8, Tuesday, January 24th,” explains BTCC during the recent trading fees announcement. “Market makers and takers will both be charged a flat fee of 0.2 percent per transaction. We are implementing fee-based trading to curb market manipulation and extreme volatility.”