In a scene straight out of the Stalinist playbook, no one dared anything but to do their part pitching in with thunderous applause. Five hundred deputies from across China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region showed up at the regional “people’s” Congress in January 2018 to elect the delegates who would represent them and the region’s 25 million inhabitants at the National [...]
Has the Keynesian intellectual been able to re-assert himself with China’s economy once again on the brink of breaking down? Li Keqiang is nominally the Communist number two but had seen his role especially in economic affairs curtailed after a 2015-16 struggle with Xi Jinping. The issue was debt versus growth.As a trained Economist, Li was responsible for the government’s [...]
The Chinese are well past their trough, so there may be some meaningful interpretations for us to take from their data. Then again, we already know there’s not much there from China’s trade figures. Exercise caution, in other words.One key reason why is that China’s going to get hit with a second wave. Virus outbreak maybe, economic disruption definitely. The [...]
It was another one of those good news, bad news data days in China. Unfortunately, the good news just doesn’t make much sense. That was Chinese exports which, according to the country’s General Administration of Customs, increased by 4.5% year-over-year in April 2020. Given the state of the world last month, exports were expected to drop by 12 to 14% [...]
It’s actually pretty easy to see why the IMF is in a hurry to secure more resources. I’m not talking about potential bailout candidates banging down the doors; that’s already happened. The fund itself is doing two contradictory things simultaneously: telling the world, repeatedly, that it has a highly encouraging $1 trillion in bailout capacity at the same time it [...]
For the second time this year, the PBOC has today affirmed Chinese banks are offering a lower benchmark loan rate. The Loan Prime Rate was reformed last August just in time for the monetary authorities in China to make it seem like they are being removed from the decisions. And in time for rate cuts to begin, too. What is [...]
Questioning the veracity of Chinese estimates (for anything) has always been something of an amateur sport. For a stat like real GDP, everyone “knows” that it is managed. In a complex world where an economic system for a billion and a half is incomprehensibly unpredictable, there’s really no other way to always hit your government’s mark (unless the Chinese are [...]
The Washington Post began this week by noting how the US economy seems to have lost its purported zip just when it needed that vitality the most. Never missing a chance to take a partisan swipe, of course, still there’s quite a lot of truth behind the charge. An actual economic boom produces cushion, enough of one that President Trump [...]
These numbers are essentially meaningless. They aren’t completely devoid of content, of course, just that such substance is of limited use. The Chinese have confirmed that their economy had shut down in the January-February period. The estimates for the Big 3 accounts were way below any and every consensus, thus demonstrating the severity of the disruption. First, the figures: Industrial [...]
Unlike the headline Establishment Survey, the rest of the economic data isn’t surging like it’s 2014 all over again. On the same day the BLS issues the next blowout payroll report, the Census Bureau suggests instead US demand, at least for goods produced overseas, continues to decline at a precipitous pace. Seasonally-adjusted, there had been something of a rebound in [...]
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