“60% of […] Chinese people with assets over 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) were either thinking about emigrating or taking steps to do so.”

If not, well… what’s this “retirement” thing you’re talking about? Is it like “bankruptcy”?

The paper will appear in next month’s Nature.

The piece, by respected journo Mike Seccombe, asks a very good question: why do Australians think we’ve got it so bad when we’ve got it so good?

And this piece – Australian Exceptionalism, by Crikey’s anonymous poll-wrangler Possum Commitatus – makes many of the same points, but with more graphs and more swearing.

15:37 08Feb12 RTRS-HOLD-UPDATE 1-Lenovo Q3 net profit // slows for 3rd straight quarter

(Adds quotes, details)

* Q3 results up XX pct to hit record

* Weak Europe demand, Thai floods damp performance

* Lenovo shares XXX, lagging/outperforming market

[…]

HONG KONG, Feb 9 (Reuters) - Lenovo Group Ltd <0992.HK>, the world’s No.2 PC maker, posted a XX percent rise in third-quarter net profit, beating/meeting/missing expectations, with sales growth slowing for a third straight quarter because of weak global PC demand and a shortage of components.

Lenovo, which last year edged out Dell Inc <DELL.O> to rank behind market leader Hewlett Packard Co <HPQ.N> in PC sales, will need to strategise to grab more market share in the fast-growing tablet PC and smartphones sector as traditional PCs and laptops have become commoditised.

Look at those Lenovo shares XXXing! They’re massively lagging/outperforming the market!

In addition, the hard-line chief of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Amoli Larijani, threatened Wednesday to seek the death penalty for major speculators. Speaking about the unrest in the foreign-exchange markets, he warned that “depending on the importance of their crimes, some of the economic corrupted can face execution,”…

…so, uh, I guess I shouldn’t be taking any trips to Iran any time soon?

The price of a pound of the fungus (which grows in the brain of infected caterpillars and is reputed to have aphrodisiac properties) has doubled in two years, and exchanges have been opened to trade these new “investment products”, but it’s not a bubble, no sir:

“On a micro level, speculation has appeared,” says Long Xingchao, president of the information center of the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The association says prices of traditional medicines, including red ginseng and false starwort, have surged since 2010, partly because of speculators. Mr. Long insists, however, that a price bubble isn’t forming. “There’s nothing to pop,” he says.

Read on, and set your faces to “stunned”:

Newfangled exchanges are sprouting across China to take advantage of the excitement. Nanjing Pharmaceutical Co. set up an exchange last year for trading traditional medicines such as deer antler. In November it extended hours so investors could trade when they get home from work. “Expanding the hours gives investors more time to make a profit,” the exchange said on its website.

I predict this exchange will do about as well as every other exotic-asset exchange in China. (Wasn’t the November rule change – previously covered on JRE – supposed to shut down operations like this? Or have they sprung up again, State Council rulings be damned?)

In not-unrelated news, here’s a rather good IMF paper on the spate of leveraged-FX-hedging EM corporate blowups in 2008, and what could be done to prevent them in future. (The most alarming is the inverse leveraged snowball AUDJPY CCS – look on page 14 – that ended up locking in an AUDJPY spot rate of 600. Not a typo: six hundred.)

The black-market rate was already north of 17,000 a couple of weeks ago, according to Reuters, and reports from inside Iran are saying that the rate has skyrocketed from 18,000 last Wednesday to 20,000 on Saturday and 23,000 on Monday. (This may ring some bells for long-time readers.)

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running the printing presses Gideon-Gono-style – and I think the reason Iran’s ratcheting up the anti-sanctions rhetoric is that their economy is imploding.

This could get quite interesting.

The Aussie retail sector has been in dire straits lately. The economy is chugging along nicely – GDP growth is running in the mid-to-high 2s, inflation is in the mid-3s, and terms of trade are at an all-time high – but you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the shopping streets of Melbourne.

The strip of Little Collins Street between Russell and Swanston has always been the best place in Melbourne for quality Australian-designed menswear. It’s never been cheap – AUD $100-200 for a shirt, that sort of thing – but it’s the sort of clothing that appeals to younger buyers with plenty of disposable income, and it’s always been a thriving strip of shops… or it was, until three months ago.

Since then, the entire strip has abruptly imploded.

Satch (one of the biggest and best-known names) and Genae have collapsed into administration. Verve and Aquila are posting “going-out-of-business” signs. Every other shop is advertising discounts of anywhere from 25-80%, but they were all completely empty – and this on a Thursday afternoon after work, with the Australian Open in full swing just half a mile down the road.

I asked a shop assistant what was going on.

“Well, things were going well for us earlier this year – and then in October, it all suddenly… died. After Satch collapsed, nobody’s been coming in, and everyone’s struggling. A year ago, people would’ve been like ‘I’ll go in, pick out five things, and I’ll just buy them’. But now everyone’s scared: it’s not that they don’t want to spend $150 on a shirt, it’s that they don’t want to spend anything at all.

“We’re doing okay, because we’re just new and we’re starting to build up some customer loyalty. But the other guys, the bigger guys – they’re really in trouble.”

The problems in Australian retail aren’t just limited to the mass-affluent crowd. JB Hi-Fi, Australia’s most successful electrical retailer, dropped a surprise profit warning just nine days before Christmas. Big department-store chain Myer has been struggling for months.

But the collapse of established groups like Satch indicates that the trouble in Australia’s retail sector is getting worse. Combine this with the dubious employment numbers – the big takeaway from today’s number is that job growth in Australia has dropped from +300,000 in 2010 to zero in 2011 – and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Aussie economy is starting to struggle.