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As to why my actions had such impacts on the stock markets, I realized that the markets knew that the ultimate recovery of U.S. economy, whether it was through the earlier bailout of major financial institutions or the coming economic stimulus package, depended heavily on China's purchase of U.S. Treasury securities. Even when I myself do not have a full grasp of the practical significance of being the leader of China, other people and the markets know better than I do.
I noticed that after I posted my first blog on this subject on December 31, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson gave an interview to Financial Times, blaming other countries (mostly China) for the financial crisis. Apparently the Bush administration saw what's coming from my first blog and had already started to pre-spin. They could afford to do so now because the financial crisis had been offloaded to the next administration. That's why Mr. Paulson gave the interview to a non-U.S. newspaper.
I am not going to respond to Mr. Paulson's shameful and idiotic remarks here. Instead, I will let the facts of the financial crisis speak for themselves. And I will organize my description of the financial crisis into three parts, separated by the day when the sun came out on the markets.
Around the day when the sun came out on the markets
I wrote on December 31, 2008:
"During the more recent financial market turmoil, the Dow Jones index shot up hundreds of points one day and nobody seemed to able to explain it. A market professional told the host of a business program on TV that the market rumor of the day was that "The sun has come out." Well, that's exactly what I told my mother over the phone the afternoon before when she asked me about Vancouver's weather. But an implication of this case was that both Bush administration and Harper government knew the plan to - I don't know how to put it - make me a monarch-like leader of China, not simply just replace Hu Jintao."
On January 4, 2009, I added:
"I still can't find out from which TV program (Nightly Business Report?, Business News Network?, or least likely, CNN?) I heard that my "private" telephone conversation had become market-moving rumor. But I am confident with my memory. As a matter of fact, I remember this market professional used bipolar - which is what I likely have - to describe the market.
I am able to determine, however, that the day when the sun came out on the markets was September 30. The Dow shot up 485 points, representing a capital gain of hundreds of billions of dollars.
As such, things are coming back to me now. Bush televised speeches. The weather in Vancouver. My own mood and how the markets reacted to my mood. Bush came on TV again in front of a bookshelf. I went to SFU library…. Plus the inexplicable. Details Soon."
The markets went up sharply on September 30 after it had discerned - thanks to the Bush administration and Harper government - that I was in a good mood. Yes, the sun had come out in Vancouver after days of rain or clouds when I called my mother on September 29. But that's hardly the reason for my good mood. I was in a good mood because of Mr. Bush's televised speech earlier that day.
As usual, Mr. Bush's message in his televised speech was in the setting. Previously, I talked about Mr. Bush's televised speech in front of a bookshelf on December 19, 2008. And I will talk about another bookshelf speech of his on September 30, 2008 later in this blog. A third example I could think of was his televised speech on September 13, 2007 where he used a piece of paper that was supposedly a letter he received from an average citizen.
I do not claim to have followed every one of Mr. Bush's televised speeches. But it would be safe to venture that it was extremely rare for Mr. Bush to go on camera at exact dawn. His message to everyone was that he had radically changed his mind and he now supported my leadership in China, where a super leader is sometimes referred to as the sun. -- Right after my blog on December 31, Mr. Bush's spokesman made a news about him being an "early riser", clearly trying to counter what I was about to reveal. If Mr. Bush really thought that my interpretation of his message were wrong, why did he bother to pre-spin my revelation?
Mr. Bush's televised message came as a big relief for me, which explained my good mood on September 29. (As it turn out, Mr. Bush is not a Junzi, as evidenced by his behavior on or around APEC Summit. But that's another story.) But the markets were reacting to the political implications of the rumor that "The sun has come out", rather than my personal mood, otherwise, how did the market know that my mood had not changed from the day before?
The markets interpreted my saying that "The sun has come out" in a good mood as a sign that I would support the U.S. bailout financially on behalf of China. Looking back, I believe Mr. Bush would not have gone to the camera at exact dawn if he had not had that request in his mind. At that time, however, I never thought about helping the U.S. bailout. My good mood was largely a result of my sensing that I was going to be free soon. To be the leader of China was, and still is, largely a very, very abstract concept in my mind.
Now comes the important question: What made Mr. Bush, who had worked against me for years, change his mind 180 degrees? To answer that question, I'll have to go back to the beginning of the financial crisis and to my borrowing the 7 books on September 16-17.
Before the day when the sun came out on the markets
On January 4, I wrote about the problem I encountered in trying to borrow these 7 books and how it might be related to the market decline on September 17:
"While researching on this subject, I also discovered another case of potential market corruption. I strongly suspect that market insiders knew before the start of trading on September 17 that I was going to borrow 7 books later that day. This may help to explain the 449 points drop in Dow that day. -- A New York Times report that day only attributed a general fear in the market for the decline. -- Of course, the potential market impact of my borrowing books was never on my mind. As I said in the [main] previous blog, I borrowed the 7 books out of fear for my own safety.
It was actually on Tuesday September 16 that I first went to the Vancouver Public Library central branch to try to check out 7 books. After I had chosen those 7 Chinese books, however, I realized that I had forgot to bring my library card with me. So I asked the library staff to hold the books for me and I went home to get my card. When I came back to the library - it must have been in the late afternoon - I found, to my surprise, that the central library was closed due to "an unknown fume". That's why those 7 books were checked out the next morning.
So the questions are: Where did the fume come from? Did it have anything to do with the governments? Was I followed in the library? Did the governments know the 7 books I left with the reserve counter on September 16? If so, did they leak that information to Wall Street insiders?"
I had said that after I saw the U.S. economic bubble was going to burst in a big way, I changed my plan from doing nothing to doing something. I did so out of fear for my own safety, which was true. I did not know exactly what Messrs. Bush and Harper's plan would have been if I had not acted. But no matter what it was, it was not going to be good for me. Perhaps subconsciously, I wanted to do something so that they would not proceed with their plan.
I also mentioned that by borrowing 7 books, I wanted to deliberately grasp people's attention, which was also true because, of all the numbers, the meaning of 7 is the most dramatic. For people who do not already know, here is my summary of the political meanings of some of the commonly used numbers (I figured them out by myself over the years so I can not say that they are 100 percent accurate):
- One is rarely used. It could mean unity?
- Two is rarely used until people gave it the meaning of eleven recently.
- Three is used to refer to former president JIANG Zemin, the third generation of Chinese leadership.
- Four is normally used to refer to current president HU Jintao, the fourth generation. Recently it has also been used to mean me.
- Five has been used for a long time to mean me as I was initially known as the candidate for the fifth generation.
- Six was sometimes used to mean me, too, after I said that I wanted to be considered for the sixth generation. (Frankly, I just wanted to get out of politics.)
- Seven means hyper-urgency and calls for immediate action. Its origin was that some anti-China crowd dreamed of dividing China into 7 pieces.
- Eight is a lucky number in Chinese. It means good fortune. As such, it could mean anything related to money, such as business or economy.
- Nine means the end of Chinese Communist Party.
- Ten means perfect?
- Eleven is considered a challenge for the United States as it invokes the event of 9/11.
Considering that my borrowing those 7 books was prompted by the market meltdown, was it really true that "the potential market impact of my borrowing books was never on my mind"? I don't know. Could it possible that, perhaps subconsciously, it was on my mind? I still don't know. Anyways, I am not a psychoanalyst so I am not going to over-analyze myself. In the end, my borrowing 7 books at the start of the financial crisis was probably an act of instinct. I wanted to do something and I did. And I stayed tight and observed afterwards.
Looking back, I would say that, had I not acted, there was a very good chance that Mr. Bush would have unloaded the financial and economic mess created largely under his watch to other countries. That was evidently his best option. (His second-best option would be to minimize the fallout from the crisis and unload the rest of it to his successor.) And he would have done so by very possibly creating another crisis, likely of a military nature because that's what Mr. Bush is good at, backed up with years' astronomical military budget. Finally, he would have framed me in his scheme.
Indeed, I think the Bush administration, with the cooperation of the Harper government, would likely have succeeded in executing their plan, given how biased western media is. (I remember that, at the beginning of the 5-day Russia-Georgia war, a TV reporter, freshly out of the White House, fumbled his notepaper to find the word to describe the Russians to his audience. And the word, as it turn out, not surprisingly, was later used by virtually all the western journalists throughout the reporting of the war, whether they worked for TV stations or newspapers, whether they were based in U.S. or elsewhere. Do you know what the word was? I will give you a hint: They have not used the word very much at all in reporting the current Israeli-Gaza conflict, although it would have been a much more pertinent word to use on the Israelis this time around. -- I agree that media freedom is important. But no less so is objectivity. Which is more evil, keeping the public in the dark or keeping the public misinformed? Thank about it.)
I mentioned in my previous blog that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a scathing speech on Russia on September 18, the day after I had borrowed those 7 books. I should also have mentioned that in Canada, ever since I wrote to the Russian Embassy for political asylum, Russia-bashing had been on Mr. Harper's agenda. He increased the intensity during my visit to Ottawa, besides beating up the urgency of a snap election. He would have surely followed Bush administration's lead after I borrowed those 7 books if not for the election campaign he was in at the time. Indeed, Messrs. Bush and Harper had previously tried to taint me as either a terrorist or a spy who worked with the Russians against the United States. As I wrote about my May 2007 visit to the Russian Embassy, they repeatedly tried to frame me then by staging sensational bomb scare incidents in Ottawa. And they had the mainstream media, such as the National Post, on their side, creating false impressions among the public beforehand.
That's why I was so worried when I noticed suspicious persons and activities around me after I came back from Ottawa in late August. Given the lethal truth, i.e., it was Mr. Bush who gave the order to the Georgia president to provoke a war with the Russians on the day of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, I tried to postpone revealing to the world, I knew that Messrs. Bush and Harper's plan was going to involve some gigantic spin and be really bad, bad, bad.
In short, that's the background for my borrowing those 7 books. I wasn't signaling to anybody to take immediate action, even though that's how 7 is interpreted politically. I was simply trying to upset Messrs. Bush and Harper's plan, no matter what it was, and to save myself.
Apparently, my action even confused both the Chinese and the Russians. The Russian Embassy sent me an email two day later, asking for more documents to support my political asylum application, apparently in displeasure. Those were unnecessary given the implicit understanding I had reached with them during my visit.
As for the Chinese, they might have interpreted that I was calling for action on the financial front. Frankly, that would have been stupid. But, I guess precisely because of this stupid interpretation of my action, Mr. Hu Jintao once again solidified his standing in the government as evidenced by "an important speech" he gave to a large gathering of provincial/ministerial level officials within 36 hours or so after I had checked out the 7 books, the earliest opportunity one could arrange such as assembly in Beijing.
In Washington, Mr. Bush canceled his travel to "closely monitor the situation in our financial markets" on Thursday September 18, as he said in a televised speech, sounding like a commander in a war. However, the markets tanked despite huge amounts of coordinated liquidity injections among several central banks. Edmund L. Andrews of New York Times reported:
"This forced Mr. [Henry M.] Paulson [Jr. The Treasury secretary], and Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, to think the unthinkable: committing taxpayer money to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in distressed assets from struggling institutions.
Rumors about the Bush administration's new stance swept through the stock markets Thursday afternoon. By the end of trading, the Dow Jones industrial average shot up 617 points from its low point in midafternoon, the biggest surge in six years, and ended the day with a gain of 410 points or 3.9 percent."
Note the timing: Late afternoon Thursday September 18 would have been early morning Friday September 19 Beijing time, just hours before the big gathering organized for Hu Jintao. Later that evening, Mr. Bush sent Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke to the Capitol Hill to meet with congressional leaders for the bailout money. It appears to me that Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke were not so much forced by the jittering markets to do the bailout, as reported by the Times. They started doing the bailout once they had made sure that Mr. Hu was back in charge in China and would, as a poodle for George W. Bush, foot the bill for them. This could explain why they did not even have a concrete proposal going into the congressional meeting on Thursday evening. Indeed, it was reported that as late as Saturday, the proposal to Congress was only three page long. The $700 billion bailout figure was more intriguing, though.
At that time, I did not have my own Internet connection. I probably spent about a couple of hours a day on the Internet. I was not appraised of these developments on a hourly basis, as such, there was no way for me to connect them together. I do remember that on Tuesday September 23, I was quite downbeat. I went to bowling with a group of people that afternoon and my mind was entirely preoccupied with the off-putting political developments, especially Bush's phone call to Hu on Monday, as I had just learned.
The phone call between Messrs. Bush and Hu was meant to help each other politically, just like their telephone calls before. Since Sino-U.S. relation was the most important bilateral relation for China, Mr. Bush's support of Mr. Hu's leadership meant a lot to Mr. Hu politically. In return, Mr. Bush must have got what he wanted, i.e., commitment from Mr. Hu to help finance his huge bailout. (After the bailout plan had been passed by the U.S. Congress, a Hong Kong-based newspaper reported that Chinese government had committed to purchasing up to $200 billion of new U.S. debt. Although I have not seen similar report through another news outlet.)
I knew these disheartening developments were connected to my borrowing those 7 books. So I started thinking of ways to fix the problem. If I could somehow let people know that the 7 books were actually supplemental to the key book, Democracy of the dead, which was mentioned in American business in China, it would dilute the political meaning of 7 somewhat.
However, I did not want people - mostly Chinese politicians - to know that I was interested in the book for a reason. -- I am interested in democratization in China; but I have to consider China's reality. I did not want to give the impression that I was interested in something that was out of reach in China. However, if the book has a Chinese translation, it probably is not that unacceptable, I thought.
The next afternoon, Wednesday September 24, I phoned UBC Asian Library to ask the librarian a question: How to find out if a English book has a Chinese translation. She was quite helpful. She not only told me the answer to my original question, she also found out that there was a copy of Chinese translation available in Vancouver Public Library.
I believe that my phone call to the UBC librarian, like virtually all my other calls, was monitored by the Harper government and Bush administration. I am not sure if this information gave Mr. Bush the urgency to imply publicly that foreign investors were to blame for the financial crisis, as he did in his prime time televised address a few hours later in the evening. (Although he did not mention China by name, it's not that difficult for people to see which country he had in mind.) China's fault was, according to him, investing too much in the United States. And this after he had played politics to make sure that China under Hu Jintao would finance his huge Wall Street bailout!
Note that, as I mentioned before, I believe that I was followed in SFU library and Mr. Obama appeared to know that I was reading Democracy of the dead there. (Indeed, from his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Obama appeared to be encouraging me to make my reading that book "public".) As such, Mr. Bush should know the book I was reading, too. Therefore, Mr. Bush did have a reason to act promptly, after my phone call to the UBC librarian, to put the blame on China, if that blame game had been part of his plan.
After watching Mr. Bush's speech, I felt a sense of urgency. Mr. Bush seemed to have completed his circle of blame: Russia, me, and now China. I immediately went to VPL that evening (in heavy downpour, if my memory is correct) to try to borrow that book.
To my disappointment as well as puzzlement, I could not find the book on the shelf, even though the computer showed that it was in the library and available. (Indeed, I remembered that, when I borrowed those 7 books one week before, I went through that bookshelf and this book was certainly not there. The first time I saw that book was on November 20.) When a library staff, having failed to locate the book for me, suggested that I put a hold on the book, I followed her suggestion.
I believe this book hold changed the perceptions of my book borrowing activities. I also believe I had come dangerously close of being framed by the Bush administration and Harper government. And I believe the consequence would have been really, really ugly - not just for myself, but for the world.
It was probably in this context that the Obama campaign told the McCain campaign that "you guys over-reacted". On Friday September 26, I first sensed that Mr. Bush was changing his attitude towards me when he repeatedly used the word big in his televised remarks. The next morning, he gave his "The sun has come out" televised speech at exact dawn to essentially entreat me to support his bailout plan on behalf of China.
After the day when the sun came out on the markets
Having listened into my telephone conversation with my mother on September 29, Mr. Bush knew that I had gotten his message, i.e., that I knew that he now supported my leadership, although not the complete one - I should add. By making his televised speech in front of a bookshelf the following day, Mr. Bush hinted to me to look into my borrowing record, as if there was some problem there.
I looked into my book records and the problem seemed to be that, since the book I reserved with VPL on September 24 still had not been found (a mystery!), the record was 7-1 rather than 8. And in Chinese, 7-1 is the short for July 1, which is the birthday of CCP. Therefore, this part of my book record might give people the impression that I was for CCP, in contradiction to my reading the book Democracy of the dead itself.
Now, I am a nice guy. If people are nice to me, I would be nice back, even if I had been wronged before. I understood that this was an important concern for Mr. Bush because it was related to his legacy, i.e., whether or not he could claim that he had played a role in China's moving to the direction of democracy, even though I knew how hypocritical he had been on this issue. So, I started thinking of ways to fix the problem for him.
Since it had been a week since I put a hold on the Chinese version of Democracy of the dead with VPL, I'd better give up waiting for it to show up. This meant that I would need to borrow the original version from the SFU library, the book I had moved to another location inside the library and read there. I also wanted to keep the total number of books 9, to make my message clear. This meant that I would have to return at least one of the two books on loan from SFU at the time.
After Mr. Bush had "told" me, with his bookshelf speech, that he was watching closely the books I was reading and wanted to communicate with me this way, I became a little conscious about my book borrowing activities. This was in comparison to my trying to draw people's attention with those 7 books earlier. Knowing that other people, especially those in the U.S. election, would be watching too, I was determined to give my best efforts. I decided to borrow the best book on Warren Buffett: The essays of Warren Buffett, arranged by Lawrence Cunningham. Given the financial crisis at hand, I wished that the Americans had had heeded Mr. Buffett's warnings years before. (I should note that, when John McCain accused Mr. Obama as a socialist during the campaign, Mr. Obama countered that "Warren Buffett is not a socialist".)
In the morning of October 1, I used the Internet and telephone to check the availability of these two books in SFU library. That's probably why someone had deliberately but slightly moved the book, Democracy of the dead, just before I got to the library later that day. It was clearly intended to bully, just like the many occasions where police cars would watch me near my home coming back from libraries. Anyways, I checked out Democracy of the dead and put in a request for The essays of Warren Buffett as it was still in processing.
Now, I don't remember when I first realized that people had given the number 2 the meaning of 11. But I am positive that, on October 1, I wasn't aware of it. Indeed, my goal was to make the total number of books on loan 9 and that was my focus on that day. (Just to be clear, I am still in favor of establishing a multi-party democracy in China, as long as it can be done in an orderly fashion.)
While researching on the financial crisis, I realized that the stock markets might have interpreted my borrowing records quite differently. If the markets interpreted the two books as 11, there were three key numbers in my borrowing records: 7, 9 and 11. The political interpretations could be complicated but the implications for the markets were not good as the markets knew the key to the success of the bailout and the recovery of U.S. economy was China's cooperation.
Since 7 is a bad number for China, 9 a bad number for CCP and 11 a bad number for the U.S., that three number came together in my borrowing records appeared to suggest that the fate of both China and U.S., in addition to the future prospect of CCP or China's democratization, were all intertwined, although I had not intentionally sent out that message with my borrowing records. Think of it. The markets got it right on the money. Whether it's nuclear weaponry (as I unwittingly discovered) or the economy (as popularized by Larry Summers), there are so-called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) between these two countries. And as I argued before, how to manage the democratic transition of China without creating chaos is not only a challenge for China, but also one for the world at large.
Given the uncertainty coming out of the interpretations of my borrowing records, it's no surprise, then, that we saw ten consecutive declines in stock markets in early October, representing 2.4 trillion dollars in total losses, despite the fact the Congress had approved the $700 billion bailout package.
As a former trader, I learned that the markets are always right. Intriguingly, the Dow Jones industrial average on the day when Mr. Bush gave his "The sun has come out" speech dropped 777 points.
That's 7 times 111. I can't explain that.
