Yesterday in a meeting I was asked by an investor why, even while I have been writing maniacally about the crucial importance of global cooperation, I was so consistently pessimistic about the possibility of the major economies arriving at a “grand bargain” that will minimize over the long term the cost of the current crisis. …
Read More…Archive for February, 2009
Chinese real estate is in the headlines again
The LA Times came out Saturday with a widely-noticed article on Beijing real estate, which features my friend Jack Rodman. Jack, who runs a firm called Global Distressed Solutions, is a bad-loan and distressed real-estate expert who has spent the last several years in China, and somehow has the energy to poke around among all …
Read More…The US government frozen in the headlights
Often enough I find that when people want to “prove” to me that China will continue growing well this year they simply quote government statements saying that China will grow by at least 8% in 2009. There is a touching faith, especially sometimes in China, in the strong connection between expert projections and the final …
Read More…Should China Devalue the Yuan?
As I reported in last Thursday’s blog entry, last week the research institute associated with China’s Ministry of Finance published a report on its website arguing that China’s central bank should “actively guide” the yuan’s exchange rate and devalue the currency to about 6.93 against the US dollar. The purpose of depreciating, the report said, …
Read More…More terrible trade numbers from China
Yesterday while I was preparing for my presentation in Hong Kong on the impact of slowing trade on the Chinese economy, one of the participants in the conference passed on to me the January trade numbers, which had just been released. Although they were “surprisingly” bad, and fit perfectly within my very gloomy presentation, they …
Read More…Will China have to choose between social stability and long-term growth?
Wow! There are now rumors that Chinese net credit growth in January was substantially higher than the already-astonishing rumors of RMB 1.2 trillion I reported last week. I will get to that at the end of this entry, but I wanted first to discuss a possibly important issue related to credit intervention. It is probably …
Read More…Hooray! China has bottomed out.
Note: In response to many complaints by people who were confused by the headline — I was being sarcastic. Puerile humor, perhaps, but the point is that over the last year it seems that we hit absolute bottom roughly every fifth week. Have we reached a bottom? A lot of analysts are pointing to the …
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