The following was written a month ago for my newsletter but because of the virus problem I had on my site I wasn’t able to post it until today. China’s official GDP growth rate has fallen sharply – on Friday Beijing announced that GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012 was a lower-than-expected 7.6% …
Read More…Category: Trade protection
How to become virtuous and save more
For this week’s blog entry I want to go a little abstract in order to suggest how different countries that participate in the global imbalances are going to adjust. The debate over the root causes of global imbalances is as fierce and as confused as ever. The confusion isn’t helped by the vast army of …
Read More…Will trade action bring back American jobs?
In the debate about global trade imbalances, we often hear it said that because Americans produce nothing that China exports to the US, any move to restrict Chinese imports to the US would have no employment effect on Americans. A forced contraction in Chinese exports would simply result in an equivalent increase in the exports …
Read More…Be careful of bilateral trade numbers
Correction: Two days after I posted the entry below I received a rather testy email from John Frisbie. In the USCBC statement to which I was referring he claimed that the EPI report was “built on the faulty assumption that every product imported from China would have been made in the US otherwise.” I foolishly …
Read More…How will an RMB revaluation affect China, the US, and the world?
The Chinese new year has only just started, and already trade tensions are ratcheting up. This is perhaps appropriate — astrologers tell us that the year of the Tiger is often a year of instability and conflict — and I suspect things will almost certainly get worse. The timing of various domestic political events in …
Read More…Good numbers? or bad numbers?
I can only submit a very short entry this time to discuss the raft of numbers that came out this morning. Regular readers will suspect that once again I am going to suggest that the numbers gave grist for everyone’s mill – optimists will see their hopes confirmed and pessimists will see their worries confirmed. …
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…Lecturing each other on trade
I finally got back to Beijing Friday, and have spent the past five days getting over jet lag and struggling to climb up the seemingly bottomless pit of unanswered emails. For those many people who have asked me about the East coast tour of the Beijing musicians, I have to say it was really good …
Read More…Banking concerns and Chinese university rankings
There were two interesting and related articles Wednesday, both suggesting that the CBRC continues to be worried about the lending boom and is making what attempt it can to slow the growth of future problems. The first article, from Bloomberg, was about the CBRC’s plan to tighten rules for personal loans: China’s banking regulator said …
Read More…Chinese railways and speculating pig farmers
This weeks’ entry is fairly miscellaneous, a consequence both of the amount and variety of news coming out of China and my own hectic schedule, which prevents me from dealing with all of these issues in a more unified way. Between lots of investor meetings and finishing up a number of writing commitments, I am …
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