The Shanghai stock market had a good day today – its last trading day before the May holiday and the very long four-day weekend. The SSE Composite is up 4.84% and trading volume was up substantially too. What seemed to propel the market today was a bunch of companies reporting good earnings, especially the banks …
Read More…Archive for April, 2009
The death of the Asian development model
One of the few areas in which the Chinese fiscal stimulus package is unquestionably having a positive effect is on growth forecasts – although mainly because forecasts seem to be coincident indicators more than leading indicators. In the past couple of week Morgan Stanley raised its 2009 forecast for Chinese GDP growth from 5.5% to …
Read More…This is getting tiresome, so please let’s declare the crisis over
I guess there is nothing like a summit meeting in the sunshine island of Hainan to bring out our optimism, but the speakers at the Boao Forum over the weekend seem to have been in fierce competition to see who could more forcefully declare the global economic crisis over, at least for China. One probable …
Read More…New trade and reserve numbers from China
Exports in March dropped a less-than-expected 17.1% from the same time last year – below expectations of 20% and the 21.1% drop for the first two months of 2009. Most of the articles I read in the Chinese and foreign press including, not surprisingly, comments from the customs bureau, hailed this as a sign that …
Read More…Is Governor Zhou a closet Bernanke-ite?
I have recently finished reading Martin Wolf’s latest book, Fixing Global Finance, and I strongly recommend it for its very clear laying out of the global balance of payments issues behind the global crisis. I should warn my readers that Wolf and I have come to very similar conclusions about the underlying root causes of …
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