A.M. Update

As they say, "What goes up, must come down".

Apparently this happened in the dark during a worldwide Bloomberg Terminal outage...

 And as the investing world was blind to quotes... apparently even the pricing of bond deals was halted. The UK's Debt management halted a debt buyback deal because of the dark terminals. The over-reliance on the chat feature of the terminals led to comments like this from a UK bond broker...

"A London-based banker said that even if you wanted to do a bond deal in today’s market, “you couldn’t as communication with possible investors and salespeople is incredibly difficult.” refferring to the Bloomberg terminal outage.

Apparently it's used much more for chat and deals than analytics or quotes.

Then as everyone was flying dark, worldwide futures crashed...

ES/SPX Futures.

European futures crashed and Chinese futures crashed about -5%.

However at the same time, China's market regulatory commission was also pushing for expanded short selling and cracking down on the use of shadow banking financing like the use of umbrella trusts to buy shares as well as making numerous comments about how "less sophisticated" investors should be wary of risk and treat the market with "awe".

Apparently as China was increasing the number of stocks that could be offered for short sale, they were also pushing for more fund managers to lend shares for shorting, apparently this part of the market structure was "less developed"...

In any case you can catch more of the story here, CHINA FUTURES TUMBLE ON TRUUST CURBS, EXPANSION OF SHORT SELLING

It looks like it had more to do with China than Bloomberg, but one obviously didn't help the other.

I wish I had time to get to some of China's market regulatory body's comments on the rise in unsophisticated investors who have a lack of respect for risk and the number of Chinese all rushing in to stocks, it's actually quite telling and in many ways, much more of an open market than our own, at least on the regulatory side or the ambition of it.