中國今年1-11月出口3.5兆美元，進口 2.5 兆美元，順差 1 兆美元，但是非常奇怪，四大國有銀行的貿易結算手續費與佣金收入沒有成長（照正常來說會有2位數百分比的成長），然後最奇怪的是，外匯存底也沒有成長。

所以這個貿易順差到底去哪裡了？假設數字正確，目前看來最可能的是外貿廠商沒有結匯，繼續以美元持有，而結匯的部分又跟外逃的資本規模相當，所以最後外匯存底維持平盤。

中國創匯的主力是大型台商，這個不結匯的操作是很可能的。只結匯必要的部分，支付租金水電薪資稅費等等，盈餘的部分都以美元繼續持有。因為結匯了就很難出來。

資本帳的部分中國現在應該都是淨流出。外資要撤，本國資本要外逃。

Elizabeth Holmes
— who, not incidentally, stole hundreds of millions of dollars from investors
— is lobbying for a pardon from President Trump.

And why not?
Game knows game. Grift knows grift.

Of all the powers a president wields, few match his awesome pardon authority.
It is sweeping and life-changing. Idiosyncratic, resting wholly on personal whim, and irrevocable.

Once granted, it is impossible to reverse.

The power to pardon is also, like any grant of authority, subject to mismanagement and abuse.

Excess being Trump's signature,
the president has, true to form,
taken his pardon power to indecent and unholy extremes.

As soon as he settled back into the Oval Office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 criminal defendants tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol,
including some who beat and pepper-sprayed law enforcement officers.

Other malefactors he's let off the hook include
Changpeng Zhao, the money-laundering former CEO of Binance,
which has ties to the Trump family's cryptocurrency business;

disgraced former congressman and embezzler George Santos;

and Illinois' politically corrupt former governor, Rod Blagojevich.

Just last week, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández,
a convicted drug trafficker who, according to prosecutors,
“paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States.

This at the same time the U.S. military ramps up its presence in Latin America and blows boats out of the Caribbean in a professed fight against drug smuggling in the region.

If you can square those actions with Hernández's pardon and not throw your back out in the process you're either more pliable than most or willfully obtuse.

Or try reconciling Trump's supposed tough-on-crime stance with his pardon of crypto cult hero Ross Ulbricht.

Ulbricht, whom a judge described as
“the kingpin of a worldwide digital drug-trafficking enterprise,”
was sentenced in 2015 to life in prison for running Silk Road, a dark web marketplace
where criminals used Bitcoin to conduct hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit trade.

Acting from behind bars, with help from family and supporters,
Ulbricht mounted a social media campaign clamoring for his release.

Among those who took note was Trump,
who championed Ulbricht's cause during the 2024 campaign as a way to woo libertarian-minded voters.

A day after his inauguration,
the president granted Ulbricht a full, unconditional pardon.

Apparently, Holmes also took note.

From her minimum security lockup,
she's begun mounting her own social media blitz in an apparent attempt to win Trump's favor
and get sprung from prison
and freed from accountability for her epic swindle.

Holmes cannot access the internet or social media, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons told the San Jose Mercury News.

So her postings,
she explains on X, are “mostly my words, posted by others."

(Her biography reads: "Building a better world for my two children. Inventor. Founder and former CEO @Theranos." Somewhere Thomas Edison is blushing.)

Holmes' feed is a babbling stream of self-help epigrams, ankle-deep reflections and many, many photos of herself.

"I gave my life to fighting for our basic human right to health information," says the would-be Joan of Arc.

Of course, there is also plenty of Trump flattery
along with paeans to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and his cockamamie make-America-sick-again agenda,
as one medical charlatan nods to another.

Nowhere does Holmes offer the slightest expression of guilt or remorse for her considerable ill-gotten gains.

At one point, she even likens herself to a Holocaust survivor,
displaying both staggeringly poor taste and utter cluelessness.

All of which makes Holmes an ideal candidate for a pardon from Trump,
who's turned self-dealing and victimization into an art form.

Maybe if Holmes is freed from jail she can find a job somewhere in his administration.

She'd fit right in.

msn.com/en-us/news/crime/barab…