Category Archives: China

Canaries in the Coalmine

by CantillonCH

The old Wall St. adage runs that ‘stocks are not bought, they are sold’, but the idea here is that they are sold to eager acquirers and that the act of selling does not therefore depress the price too much. The same cannot be said of what we have experienced these past six weeks or so.

If the damage in the major indices—measured from the early December highs—has so far been limited to a ‘corrective’ 10%, others—whether geographically more far-flung or more sector-specific—have not been so fortunate. Continue reading …

Inside, Outside, Nowhere is Home

by CantillonCH

To the delight of everyone with a vested interest in the continuance of the global central bank bubble, the latest data round from China revealed that, in the past four months, the cumulative total of new RMB loans in China has set a major new high, amounting to no less than CNY4.6 trillion—a number 50% or so greater than the average of the preceding two years and one equal to around $730 billion, or $6 billion a day, even at today’s newly depreciated rate of exchange. Yet, in that same time, the figure for ‘total social finance’ rose by no more than (sic) the 2012-14 seasonal average of CNY5 trillion.

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Reserve Judgement

by CantillonCH

With regard to the vexed issue of the renminbi, let’s focus on the basics. The official response to July’s stock market collapse saw loans to non-bank financials (the PPT) rise CNY891bln. Many of the recipients, the bailees, took their funds and either moved them abroad or paid back external loans, causing a record CNY242bln efflux.

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The Only Form of Permanence

by CantillonCH

Perhaps the first great lesson of economics, as emphasized by Henry Hazlitt, is that there is no free lunch. The second, courtesy of Frederic Bastiat, is that if it sometimes appears that there is one, it means that we simply have not looked deeply enough into the consequences of our attempt to enjoy it. The third, the joint insight of several generations of Austrians, is that the attempt to buy one for ourselves by resort to monetary manipulation is eventually doomed to fail. A cynic might say that the fourth and final lesson is that no-one ever wishes to abide by the strictures inherent in the first three rules. Continue reading …

Moths to the Flame

by CantillonCH

That’ll teach’em!

Enticed by the seemingly risk-free profits being offered by the Chinese stock market stabilization drive, burned fingers spent the week from the lows creeping back to the flames, adding another $1 billion-a-day to the official margin total as they did. Continue reading …

We Will All Go Down Together

by CantillonCH

When we last wrote, some brave analyst at a Chinese brokerage was making headlines by talking of there being at least another CNY2–2.5 trillion in ‘shadow’ margin debt to add to the peak CNY2.3 trillion registered on the exchange ( that latter now already shrunken by over a third). Since then, the ante has been upped by one of our hero’s competitors, who added another CNY1-1.2 trillion to that already gargantuan guess. The man from Huatai Securities also suggested that half of the total was effectively being financed by the nation’s banks, whether they are strictly authorised to do so or not. Continue reading …

Monday Morning Macro

by CantillonCH

Though the punditocracy has become much more aware of the sheer scale of China’s equity bubble in recent weeks, it is still arguably the case that reality is running ahead of reportage even as more and more evidence emerges of just how dire things are in the world beyond the brokerage screens.

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The South (China) Sea Bubble

by CantillonCH

The first hard data release of the month for China was hardly guaranteed to reassure. Two-way trade in USD terms dropped 6.3% in the first quarter from its level of a year ago, the second most severe setback since the Crash and only the third such instance in the whole era of ‘Opening Up’.

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Market Mayhem

by CantillonCH

Between Li Keqiang, Mario Draghi, and the BLS, markets everywhere had a wild ride into the weekend.

Starting east and working west, the upshot of the Chinese ‘Twin Sessions’ was a perseverance with the so-called ‘New Normal’ theme – namely, with the idea that headline, GDP-style growth should be lower in future with the emphasis shifting from brute volume to the encouragement of a shift in the productive structure towards the provision of higher-value added, more technology-rich goods, towards service in place of smokestacks, aall the better to spread the benefits of industrialization to the domestic populace.

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