The last time was bad, no getting around it. From the end of 2014 until the first months of 2016, the Chinese economy was in a perilous state. Dramatic weakness had emerged which had seemed impossible to reconcile with conventions about the country. Committed to growth over everything, and I mean everything, China was the one country the world thought [...]
Give stimulus a chance, that’s the theme being set up for this week. After relentless buying across global bond markets distorting curves, upsetting politicians and the public alike, central bankers have responded en masse. There were more rate cuts around the world in August than there had been at any point since 2009. And there’s more to come. As Bloomberg [...]
Chinese monetary authorities announced today what will be for some of its banks a seventh round of “stimulus.” For the largest institutions, it will "only" be their sixth and the first one since January 2019. The PBOC has decided it is time for more RRR cuts. Effective September 16, the ratio all banks are required to hold of reserves will [...]
Earlier this year, Chinese authorities reduced the VAT tax the government charges auto manufacturers. Intended to boost consumption, the levy was reduced from 16% to 13% in the hope automakers would pass along the savings to consumers. Many if not most manufacturers did. The results were immediate, and fleeting. In the month of March 2019, total car sales fell “only” [...]
For a cabal of superpatient supergeniuses, the Chinese tend to play with fire quite often. According to many, the Communists have perfected the art of technocracy and are merely waiting out the impetuously free West. The dollar system will destroy itself (there’s the kernel of truth) allowing a perfectly positioned China to swoop in and rescue the global economy with [...]
Always aspiring to technocratic greatness, China’s Communist Party is set up to run like clockwork. It’s supposed to go off in predestined fashion, a course programmed into the vast apparatus by highly proficient experts. It is, or is supposed to be, comforting that order and control over the complex main spheres of daily life can be managed down the detail [...]
The Chinese have been reforming their monetary and credit system for decades. Liberalization has been an overriding goal, seen as necessary to accompany the processes which would keep the country’s economic “miracle” on track. Or get it back on track, as the case may be. Authorities had traditionally controlled interest rates through various limits and levers. It wasn’t until October [...]
There may yet be bitter irony in the fact that China’s nascent embrace of capitalism in the late eighties allowed it to survive the wave of failed socialist states which fell all throughout the world at the time. While the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern bloc nearly disappeared, and even the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chinese would stand almost [...]
Toward the end of June, Chinese RMB money markets seemed like they had weathered the worst of it. One month earlier, in late May, regulators had seized Baoshang Bank Co. sending waves of uncertainty rippling through markets in China and around the world. Authorities were quick to declare “nothing to see here”, blaming the bank’s close relationship with absentee billionaire [...]
On the one hand, it’s a small silver lining in how many even in the mainstream are beginning to realize that there really is something wrong. Then again, they are using “trade wars” to make sense of how that could be. For the one, at least they’ve stopped saying China’s economy is strong and always looks resilient no matter what [...]
Stay In Touch