Chinese economic data for April 2017 has been uniformly disappointing. External trade numbers resembled too much commodity prices, leaving an emphasis on them rather than actual economic forces. The latest figures for the Big 3, Industrial Production, Retail Sales, and Fixed Asset Investment, unfortunately also remained true to the pattern. Industrial Production had seemingly accelerated in March, rising to a [...]
First quarter GDP in China rose 6.9%, better than expected and above the government’s target (6.5%) for 2017. It stands to reason, however, that if Communist officials thought they could get 6.9% to last for the whole year they would have made it their target, especially since 6.5% would be less than the GDP growth rate for 2016 (6.7%). In [...]
The first major economic data of 2017 from China was highly disappointing to expectations of either stability or hopes for actual acceleration. On all counts for the combined January-February period, the big three statistics missed: Industrial Production was 6.3%, Fixed Asset Investment 8.9%, and Retail Sales just 9.5%. For retail sales, the primary avenue for what is supposed to be [...]
The only unequivocally positive aspect to the looming “stimulus” debate is the immense political theater it will generate, and has already generated. Hypocrisy will be standard fare, and in any number of ways. For every Occupy Wall Street Obama supporter who found himself likely for the first time in his life enthusiastically embracing “record high stocks” in 2013 will now [...]
Nowhere is the “dollar’s” effects more damaging than in any real economy dependent upon it. It is quite fitting that on a day when the PBOC surprises with a desperate move to reduce the RRR for big banks, who have already been for some time the outlet for massive RMB liquidity, Chinese officials release economic statistics that show little or [...]
Chinese industrial production, retail sales, and fixed asset investment were all taken as better or improving. Industrial production, for example, was 6.2% in November 2016, up from 6.1% in both September and October. Retail sales grew 10.8%, the best rate since December 2015. Fixed asset investment grew by an accumulated rate of 8.3% for the second straight month, better by [...]
A big reason why Chinese banks struggled yesterday in their daily bid for “dollars” (CNY DOWN) was the relatively unchanged economic statistics for November. Many in the media have tried to frame China’s economic situation in 2016 as if stabilizing were a positive outcome. Markets, especially funding markets, aren’t so enthused about the prospects for “weak but not getting weaker.” [...]
There are those who believe that the Chinese economy has stabilized, as if that was a good thing. Many of these people, mostly economists, said and declared much the same after 2012. That China’s economy might be in 2016 merely as bad as it was in 2015 is a highly negative development, one which requires standards for economic judgment to [...]
The US is not alone in its corporate profit slump. In China, profits at State-Owned Enterprises fell a further 6.5% year-over-year in the January to July period. Estimated to have been RMB 1.31 trillion (about $195 billion), SOE profits are being dragged down by those firms under control of the central government. Locally-administered SOE’s showed net income declining by only [...]
The simple fact of the matter is that 2012 wasn’t supposed to happen. By every orthodox prediction and theory about the set of tools deployed after the Great Recession (after it, the first clue) there was no reason to suspect anything but the usual cyclical occurrences. Sure, the recovery would be weak because the recession large, but retrenchment was never [...]
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