I don’t have time to do a long entry today, but in my June 30 entry I marveled at the huge explosion in new lending, and claimed that credible rumors suggested that total new loans for June would be an astonishing RMB 1.2 trillion. That would bring total new lending for 2009 to RMB 7.06 [...]
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Posted in Banks, NPLs • 59 Comments »
“China’s overall surge in credit in the first half of 2009,” an article in yesterday’s People’s Daily assures us, “is normal and healthy; however problems still exist in the structure, quality and flow of credit. China should continue to optimize credit structure and guard against potential risks.” Credible rumors suggest that new loans in June [...]
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Tags: CBRC, Chancellor, Rome
Posted in Banks, Fiscal debt and deficits, NPLs • 54 Comments »
Things have been so busy this past week with various writing commitments and with the celebration of the third anniversary of my music club (four amazing shows with some of Beijing’s greatest artists and a lot of support and coverage from local music scene participants an the press) that I have been neglecting my blog. [...]
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Tags: Lewis Carroll, PG Wodehouse, SMEs
Posted in Asian development model, Banks, Fiscal stimulus, Money growth, NPLs • No Comments »
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 [...]
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Posted in Asian development model, Banks, Consumption and production, Fiscal stimulus, NPLs • No Comments »
Replenishing bank capital One of the students in Peking University’s Guanghua Students Monetary Policy Committee, a group for which I am an advisor, put together last week a summary of plans to raise capital adequacy ratios for Chinese banks. I thought it would be useful to reproduce his numbers. According to him, Shenzhen Development Bank, [...]
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Tags: Subordinated debt
Posted in Banks, Currency regime, NPLs • Comments Off
Wow! There are now rumors that Chinese net credit growth in January was substantially higher than the already-astonishing rumors of RMB 1.2 trillion I reported last week. I will get to that at the end of this entry, but I wanted first to discuss a possibly important issue related to credit intervention. It is probably [...]
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Tags: Chile, Great depressions, Mexico
Posted in Financial crisis, NPLs, Policy • No Comments »
Note: In response to many complaints by people who were confused by the headline — I was being sarcastic. Puerile humor, perhaps, but the point is that over the last year it seems that we hit absolute bottom roughly every fifth week. Have we reached a bottom? A lot of analysts are pointing to the [...]
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Tags: Inventory, wages
Posted in Money growth, NPLs • No Comments »
As the rhetoric around trade continues to deteriorate and the incidence of name calling rises, it is getting harder and harder to discuss global trade and monetary conditions dispassionately and objectively. This should not come as a surprise, and is something I have been “predicting” for several years as part of the standard package of events that [...]
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Tags: Name-calling
Posted in Balance sheets, NPLs • No Comments »
There is some good news about Chinese retail sales, although I am not sure how useful it is because retail sales numbers in China have always been a little hard to reconcile with other indicators of domestic demand. According to an article in today’s Bloomberg: Retail sales in China rose 13 percent during the three-day [...]
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Tags: PMI, Victor Shih
Posted in Consumption and production, Labor and unemployment, NPLs • No Comments »
I was in Shanghai for the past two days and so wasn’t able to write anything on my blog, although it doesn’t seem like a whole lot has happened recently to add to our understanding of the Chinese economy. The stock market continues to behave poorly, with the SSE Composite dropping 2.6% on Tuesday and [...]
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Tags: AMCs
Posted in NPLs • No Comments »