According to a recent article on Reuters, on Saturday Lou Jiwei, the chairman of the CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, said at a conference on Saturday in response to a question about his expected performance: “It will not be too bad this year. Both China and America are addressing bubbles by creating more bubbles and …
Read More…Archive for August, 2009
The credibility of farmers, priests and prostitutes – and bankers?
Three weeks ago China Daily published a pretty funny article about a recent survey on credibility that had taken place in China. According to the article, At a time when shamelessness is pervasive, we are often at loss as to who can be trusted. The five most trustworthy groups, according to a survey by the …
Read More…Yet another discussion on the Asian savings glut hypothesis, and why it matters
The Shanghai stock market was up 4.5% in very nervous trading today but down 16.3% since its recent peak at 3478 on August 4, and still trading at more than 30 times earnings. All this turmoil is triggering all sorts of worried comments about the sustainability of the fiscal stimulus package and whether it has …
Read More…The USG doesn’t need foreigners to finance the US fiscal deficit? Who knew?
I usually don’t post a new entry so soon after the last post, but there was an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Andrew Batson. China is center stage when it comes to fears that buyers will one day spurn U.S. Treasurys. The bond market has been the source of much political theater …
Read More…Predicting consumption growth in China
My ten-day trip – partly holiday on Phuket and Phi Phi islands (even more beautiful than I had expected) and mostly meetings in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore – finally ended yesterday. Besides three presentations to large investment groups, I met about twenty to thirty institutional investors in small meetings, and those meetings were very …
Read More…What should have been discussed during the SED meetings (Part 2)
In my last entry I tried to set out the necessary shifts over the next few years as the world, and especially China and the US, works out its imbalances. These shifts will take place, I am pretty sure, but they can do so under a “good” scenario and a “bad” scenario. So what does …
Read More…What should have been discussed during the SED meetings (Part 1)
By coincidence I had two OpEd pieces that came out last week, one in the WSJ and the other in the Financial Times. The latter came about because about a month ago Martin Wolf asked me to write a piece based on my June 20 entry. The former came about on the previous Friday when …
Read More…More debate about the validity of economic data
Some of the blog readers have noticed some weird goings-on with recent entries. From time to time an entry will pop up that seems totally inappropriate to current events. Sorry. This is because the old host of my blog, when it was on a different site, is closing down, and I have been going through …
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