China Financial Markets

Last night the PBoC surprised the market with its biggest rate cut since 1997. Lending rates for one year or more were cut by 108 bps, while the six month lending rate was cut by 99 bps. Deposit rates were also cut, but with smaller cuts in short term rates (36 bps for demand deposits) [...]

Fareed Zakaria usually writes very interesting pieces on international policy issues, but it seems to me that there is so much mystery about how the global balance of payments works that he, like so many others, makes simplifying assumptions that don’t take the balance into account, and for that reason just don’t make sense. In [...]

Too much travel and a longish writing commitment have kept me from posting on my blog recently, but I plan to return to it over the weekend. I did want to mention a couple of things quickly today however. The first is that the unemployment situation here has gotten grim enough that the government is [...]

On Friday Chinese stock markets capped one of the best weeks in an awfully long time, with the SSE Composite closing at 1986, up 3.1% for the day and 13.7% for the week. Although a lot of local analysts have been saying that the rally is long overdue and represents confirmation that we have bottomed [...]

Chinese stock markets have bucked the trend in the rest of the world by posting a decent day yesterday and a great day today. Yesterday the SSE Composite rose 0.8%, and today it rose another 3.7% to close at 1928. I don’t think the rally was caused by good economic news – today’s data release [...]

On Sunday I suggested that the newly-announced RMB 4 trillion fiscal package would cause markets to surge, but that the rally would not last very long as analysts began examining the numbers more closely. In fact the duration of the rally was even shorter than I expected. On Monday the markets did indeed surge, with [...]

After dropping as low as 1679 on Tuesday the Chinese stock markets managed nonetheless managed to put in a decent week, with the SSE Composite closing the week at 1748, up 1.1% for the week, helped by Tuesday’s Obama-inspired global rally. A lot of people have asked me what I think the bottom of the [...]