I suspect most of my readers outside China are more interested in enjoying the holiday season than in spending much time following my blog, while most of my readers inside China are focusing on upcoming exams, but anyway my recent writing commitments are so intense that I haven’t been able to post much recently. For …
Read More…Archive for December, 2008
Can parochial concerns undermine the global adjustment? They have before
Between the holiday slowdown and the number of writing commitments I have it has been a little too easy to neglect my blog. What free time I have has been spent reading, and I am reading for the third time what I think is one of the best books ever written on financial history – …
Read More…Germany is fighting with Europe. Can China be far behind?
Earlier this week Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had an article in the UK paper The Telegraph which starts off with “For the first time in my life, I am starting to feel twinges of anti-German sentiment.” The article goes on to lambaste the German government, and especially German finance minister Peer Steinbrück, for what Paul Krugman earlier …
Read More…I still think its money, not pork, and I think credit is contracting very rapidly
In all the worry about the trade numbers I haven’t discussed another data release last week which, until recently, would have been the most important piece of economic news for me. It was only a few months ago that we were intensely debating the cause of rising inflation in China. Now, inflation is clearly receding. …
Read More…No f&#-ing way! These numbers are awful!
“The most striking real economic fact of the past several months is not continued U.S. economic weakness, but that China’s economy has slowed much more quickly than anyone had forecast,” Australia’s central bank Governor Glenn Stevens said this week. Not quite “anyone”. Quite a few people who read this blog, some of them quite prominent, …
Read More…China’s exports contracted in November
After trading up four days in a row, with the SSE Composite closing on Monday at 2091, up 3.6% for the day, the market turned today and the SSE Composite lost 2.5% to close at 2038, less than one point off its intra-day bottom. What drove the four good days was continued talk of government …
Read More…Dani Rodrik is letting the cat out of the bag
In the latest posting on his blog, Dani Rodrik is saying things that I have been implying in some of my pieces but have been very reluctant to say explicitly, largely because I don’t like the political implications for international trade. Rodrik’s post, which is titled “Some unpleasant Keynesian arithmetic”, begins by wondering what the …
Read More…Is China experiencing dollar outflows?
The government was actively buying stocks today and as a result, not surprisingly, the market surged on hopes that they are serious about putting an end to the bear market. After declining yesterday by 0.3%, the SSE Composite jumped 76 points today to close the day at its high of 1965, up 4.0%. Central Huijin, …
Read More…China isn’t losing its competitive edge
The stock market had a decent day today, with the SSE Composite rising 1.25% to close at 1895. Bad news about manufacturing was overshadowed by an announcement that the government will expand a plan to subsidize household appliance purchases by farmers. That helped appliance manufacturers, who led the market up. I suspect that we will …
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