What your comments suggest to me, Jorge, is that my initial reading of the December announcement was correct, and the consistent content of all the official statements of the PBoC confirm, that there is no prohibition on banking relationships with exchanges in China. The restriction is on banks taking on exposure to BTC, meaning they cannot have risk positions in BTC, nor can they denominate accounts in BTC.
As all the fear mongering is rendered foolish
Well, there have been at least four or five instances of banks closing the exchange accounts to deposits, confirmed by the exchanges themselves on their websites.
Curiously, Huobi had a note dated April 11 on their website reporting the account closures,
but they seem to have pulled it. The newest note there is dated April 10. They seem to be revamping their home page, and even the link to the latter seems to be gone.EDIT: the note is still there:
http://www.huobi.com/news/index.php?a=show_notice&id=308It
may be that the banks were over-reacting to some PBoC vague note, or to the Caixin article itself (although some of the closures were communicated to the exchanges well after the article came out). Or it may be that the exchanges
managed to convice some of the other banks.
One important point in Huobi's April 11 note, IMHO, was a paragraph which I understood as follows: "We believe that the goal of the PBoC's 'Strengtening the December decrees' circular was to combat money laudering and other crimes. We have done a lot in this regard and we are ready to cooperate with the authorities, hoping that we can reach a compromise that will let us keep the bank path open." Again. this makes me belive that the 'Strenghtening' circular saw by Caixin was not a PBoC decision but came from law enforcement and national security agencies.
EDIT:
the result may be that every auntie and grandmother in China buys a bitcoin for the baby. About 200 million out of perhaps 200,000 floating bitcoin.
The July bubble may be a second China bubble.
The December bubble will be the ETP bubble, and much larger.
Maybe...
