China Financial Markets

Another terrible day on the stock market saw the SSE Composite, led kicking and screaming by energy and financial companies, trade more or less straight down by 3.2% to close the day at 2203.  The brilliant autumn weather in Beijing (and the best week for air quality I have seen in seven years of living [...]

Today is an anniversary of sorts.  Thirty-seven years ago, in 1971, President Nixon stunned the US by announcing the imposition of extensive wage and price controls in an effort to reverse rising inflation in the US.  In retrospect it is pretty clear that the price and wage controls were unlikely to reverse several years of [...]

A report in today’s China Daily says:   Second-quarter housing prices in 70 large and medium-sized Chinese cities rose 9.2 percent year-on-year, said the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday.  The rise was 1.8 percentage points less than in the first quarter.   One of the regular debates [...]

PPI numbers were released today and producer prices are up year on year by 8.2%, which is higher than April’s 8.1% and March’s 8.0%.  Coal, steel, and energy price increases drove the jump in PPI.  Although everyone expects May’s CPI inflation number, which will be released tomorrow, to be 7.7%, much lower than April’s 8.5%, [...]

The stock market had another good day today.  My teaching assistant Shang Ning tells me that it started the day strong, faltered in the late morning, and then finished with a burst of energy to close up 1.84%.  There seems to be continued confidence in the government’s determination to prevent a further collapse in prices [...]