I have often written in this blog and elsewhere about the three policy choices Beijing faces as it tries to manage through the adjustment process. My argument is that subject to two very plausible assumptions, every economic policy Beijing implements ultimately can be abstracted to one choice among three options. These two assumptions are: China […]
Read More…Category: Consumption
Does it matter if China cleans up its banks?
I’ve always thought that Shirley Yam of the South China Morning Post has a great nose for financial risk, and this shows in an article she published last week on mainland real estate. For anyone knowledgeable about the history of financial bubbles and crises, much of the following story will seem extremely familiar. The point […]
Read More…Will China’s new “supply-side” reforms help China?
It wasn’t enough that we started 2016 with one of the worst weeks in the recent history of Chinese and global markets, but the panic continued into the following weeks and wreaked a great deal of damage to confidence. A lot of the reflexive China bulls are cautioning against misinterpreting the implications of the stock […]
Read More…China’s rebalancing timetable
We often read in the press rather alarming stories about the rise of an ugly and belligerent nationalism in China, buy cialis but while these stories are certainly very real, sovaldi after the November 13 bombings in Paris I was struck by a very different kind of Chinese behavior. A lot of young people that […]
Read More…Thin Air’s money isn’t created out of thin air
A recurring conversation I have with clients concerns the ability of banks to create credit, buy and of governments to monetize debt, pilule and whether this ability is the solution to or the cause of financial instability and economic crisis. Monetarists and structuralists (to use Michael Hudson’s names for the two sides, illness whose centuries-long […]
Read More…China’s stock markets and revisiting 2011 predictions
I plan to post a new entry very soon but before doing so I wanted to say a few things about the stock markets, which continue to be insane (but not unexpectedly so) and then repost a blog entry that is nearly five years old. By the time I published my latest (July 17) blog […]
Read More…Interview on Chinese CPI and PPI data for December
The National Bureau of Statistics released today CPI and PPI data for December 2014. People’s Daily summarizes the CPI data, which came in pretty close to market expectations: China’s consumer prices grew 2 percent in 2014 from one year earlier, well below the government’s 3.5 percent target set for the year, official data showed on […]
Read More…How might a China slowdown affect the world?
Two years ago it was hard to find analysts who expected average GDP growth over the rest of this decade to be less than 8%. The current consensus seems to have dropped to between 6% and 7% on average. I don’t think Beijing disagrees. After assuring us Tuesday that China’s economy – which is growing […]
Read More…“…not with a bang but a whimper”
Doug, Pancoast, an American entrepreneur living in Shanghai, asked to interview me for his blog, and I agreed to do so. I think it was meant to be a brief interview, but I began to respond on a Saturday evening, while waiting for the performance at my club to begin (my office is at my […]
Read More…What does a “good” Chinese adjustment look like?
I have always thought that the soft landing/hard landing debate wholly misses the point when it comes to China’s economic prospects. It confuses the kinds of market-based adjustments we are likely to see in the US or Europe with the much more controlled process we see in China. Instead of a hard landing or a […]
Read More…