In the May 10 issue of my blog I referred to a very interesting IMF paper written by Il Houng Lee, Murtaza Syed, and Liu Xueyan. The study, “China’s Path to Consumer-Based Growth: Reorienting Investment and Enhancing Efficiency”, attempts among other things to evaluate the efficiency of investment in various provinces within China. I argued in the newsletter that the paper supported my contention …
Read More…This post is extracted from my newsletter sent out four weeks ago, at a time when the mood in Europe was much better than now and when there was even a sense that the crisis was in the process of being resolved. I mention this to remind readers of how quickly sentiment can chnage. —— …
Read More…Because of US and European pressure Beijing may allow much faster appreciation of the renminbi than it likes over the next year, but this will almost certainly be accompanied with policies that reduce the adverse employment impact. In my opinion the most likely such policy involves credit. If Beijing expands cheap credit, however, it may …
Read More…In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble. The most common question is whether or not there is a threshold of debt (measured, say, against total GDP) above which …
Read More…With the PBoC’s currency announcement last Saturday and the surge (!) in the value of RMB on Monday (all very kindly timed to add zest to my meetings this week in Boston, New York, and Washington), you would assume that today’s entry would be all about the RMB and the effect of the PBoC announcement. …
Read More…“How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fix,” asked William Butler Yeats plaintively in the midst of the political upheavals of the early 1930s, “on Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics?” Well, love and beauty in the Beijing spring weather notwithstanding, it is hard once again not to fix attention on …
Read More…After such a long entry last week I thought I would spare my readers and do something much briefer. A few days ago I read a good article (“Stuck on Neutral”) about Japan in the August 18 issue of the Economist. You can find the article on the Economist website if you are a premium …
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Since it is the Christmas holiday, and I am spending the week in southern Spain with my family, I have not been focusing too heavily on economic data and have instead been reading lots of different stuff, including Frederic Wakeman´s excellent The Fall of Imperial China, about the transition from the Qing, especially the late …
Read More…The third down week in a row had the SSE Composite finishing with a 1.1% loss Thursday and a 1.9% loss Friday, to close at 1840. Checking the historical data provided by Bloomberg indicates that we have to go back nearly two years, to November 2006, right around the beginning of the ferocious Chinese bull …
Read More…The market continued its losing streak with the SSE Composite dropping 64 points to close at 2093, down 3.0% for the day, with financial institutions and property developers once again leading the way. During the trading day my student Shang Ning sent me the following (slightly edited) email: The PBoC issued 1-year bills, at …
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