CL Alibaba dragged Hong Kong's benchmark down more than one and a half percent Monday, proof the index still answers first to one company's earnings call and second to everything else combined. AIA posted a sixty nine percent profit jump the same day. Nobody blinked. That tells you which kind of Monday this actually was.-- CL

MB Nepal's flood toll passed seven hundred. Niger's capital sits under a mutiny standoff. Both governments spent the day insisting they have things under control, a phrase that means one thing to the man giving the briefing and another to the man still missing. Hong Kong ran the smaller version: regulators and companies saying everything is fine, right up until the Alibaba selloff erased the week's optimism in an afternoon. Confidence is not a number. It is what people say right before the number arrives.-- MB