The Bank Of The Yalu River? Part 2

Continuing the drama from... North Korea, China and The US: Bank of the Yalu River?

Two days ago – Chosun a Korean news agency reported, the PRC has moved an estimated 150K troops to the border of the North Korea in order to prepare for “unforeseen circumstances.”

Over at a financial forum...

That link to the Chosun relies heavily on a Japanese paper, the Sankei Shimbun. They note that long-range (2800km) Chinese missiles and submarine units are on alert, but also that the medical and logistic units are undergoing 'training' to handle refugees.  

I don't know if any of this is above usual procedure. The US/RoK joint exercise always happen this time of the year, and certain chunks of them are still going on. The Carl Vinton's return, though, is threatening. The Korean news broadcasts are not happy about it. - Sno

Post Feb 26th Chinese Ban on importation of North Korean coal:  A source at Dandong Chengtai (the biggest buyer of North Korean coal) said the company had 600K tonnes of North Korean coal sitting at various ports, and a total of 2M tonnes was stranded at various Chinese ports, waiting to be returned. -  GCaptain

I would suspect that any troops there are to prevent a mass exodus of refugees from NK to China. Nothing more.  I am greatly concerned for South Korea right now.  So concerned that I am trying to get a family members out of there for a nice vacation in the US. - Gin

Yesterday, China’s customs department has issued an official order telling Chinese trading companies to return their North Korean coal cargoes. Resulting in a fleet of North Korean cargo ships heading home to the port of Nampo, the majority of it fully laden. - NBC News

China keeps a fair number of troops on the border as a precaution against regime collapse, as Gin said. A plausible scenario could be that they'd invade to keep the southerners from taking over the north.  The carrier group was just here a couple of weeks ago for the annual "Let's piss off NK" spring joint exercise, so they're a familiar sight. That said, their return is threatening... this is the closest we've been to war here in decades. - Sno

Meanwhile in the market, betting on a 12% mid summer decline in iShares MSCI South Korea Index Fund (EWY)?  Last Friday when the ETF was $60, investors bought about 17K July $55 strike price puts on the $3.2B ETF. Hedging against a possible missile attack or full blown conflict?

At present, North Korea is reported to possess somewhere on the order of a dozen or more nuclear explosive devices, massive stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, several hundred ballistic missiles capable of reaching South Korea and Japan, and several thousand artillery guns trained on the South Korean capital of Seoul.

In order for a preventive strike against North Korean nuclear weapons to succeed, US intelligence would have to predict the number and location of all of those (presumably well-hidden) weapons with perfect accuracy and US air and naval forces would have to successfully destroy all of them in a surprise attack.  

If even one device survives to be hurled at South Korea or Japan, or placed on a container ship to be smuggled to a US port and detonated, the consequences would be prohibitively dire.  - Trump's North Korea Gambit

Meanwhile, on Sunday April 9th at 12:15AM Pyongyang Radio announced:

"From now on, we announce tasks of mechanical engineering review for the Unit 21 expedition members of the remote education university.  Number 69 on page 602, number 79 on page 133, number 18 on page 216."

A total of 70 sets of such five digit numbers were read out twice. Pyongyang Radio last aired a similar broadcast on March 24. North Korea suspended such broadcasts in 2000. This was the 31st such broadcast since reviving the practice on June 24th 2016. 

It is believed that the radio broadcasts are Cold War style coded orders to spy cells outside of the country.  Shades of Boris, Natasha, Moose and Squirrel, Out.