A large part of my newsletter earlier this week discussed emergent scandals in the railway industry and their implications for the overinvestment debate, and this was even before the Alibaba scandals broke, but I think a lot more interest this week surrounded the inflation numbers. Last week the National Bureau of Statistics released inflation data …
Read More…Category: Inflation
Chinese inflation and European defaults
Part 1. Will Europe face defaults? Its official – Spain and Portugal will need to be bailed out soon. How do I know? In one of my favorite TV shows, Yes Minister, the all-knowing civil servant Sir Humphrey explains to cabinet minister Jim Hacker that you can never be certain that something will happen until …
Read More…China: where’s the inflation?
I apologize for waiting two weeks since my last post, but my schedule has been crazier than usual what with the SED meeting and a number of conferences and visitors to Beijing. What’s more, next week I will go to New York and environs for a week, followed by a week in Italy. It always …
Read More…China new year, and one more vote for GDP-adjusted bonds
I just got back to Beijing three days ago and am still seriously jet-lagged, but I wanted to post a piece today anyway. Last night I celebrated the new year at D22, where a group of very cool musicians (including the amazing Snapline, for one of their very few shows this year and perhaps one …
Read More…Exporters are complaining loudly
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…Trade, CPI and other numbers came in this week
Deflation and debt On Monday CPI and PPI numbers for February came out. CPI was down 1.6% year and year and PPI was down 4.5%, in line with or slightly below expectations and, according to Bloomberg, the highest rate of deflation among the 78 countries they follow. Some of this may be caused by one-off …
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…The RMB 4 trillion fiscal engine seems to be losing steam
On Sunday I suggested that the newly-announced RMB 4 trillion fiscal package would cause markets to surge, but that the rally would not last very long as analysts began examining the numbers more closely. In fact the duration of the rally was even shorter than I expected. On Monday the markets did indeed surge, with …
Read More…Don’t count too heavily on China’s domestic market
There’s still no respite for Chinese stocks. The market bounced around violently today with the SSE Composite making at least eight or nine up or down moves of more than 1%, before closing the day at 1720, down 0.5% for the day. This is the lowest closing in over two years (it closed at 1722 …
Read More…Fire and Ice
There is still no respite for the Chinese stock market (or, for that matter, of any of the other global stock markets). On Thursday the SSE composite fell more or less in a straight line, losing 72 points, or 3.3%, rising a single point on Friday to close at 2079. We are now less than …
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