Post Tagged with: "China"
Global Manufacturing Steadies as She Goes, or Does She?
The year got off on a much better foot than might have been expected, at least as far as global manufacturing is concerned. So the fall in global manufacturing has flattened out, even though the bounce back has more of a dead cat look about it than anything else. As usual in recent months the report was very much a mixed bag
Stephen Roach on US, the Fed, China, and Europe
Stephen Roach says the Fed is going all in in support of QE and I agree. But what else are they going to do? Look at Europe, for example. The ECB there has a hydra-headed problem with sovereigns and banks on the brink of insolvency and they too have expanded the balance sheet like mad. China faces many of the same challenges with excess credit growth and fragile financial firms in the face of asset price deflation
On building debt
I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate sector. I have always argued that it is infrastructure where the most amount of investment has been wasted
On the Collapse of the Shanghai Composite
Shanghai’s channel surfing Panda bears are speaking with a little higher pitch this weekend after getting their ‘hood caught in a vicious squeeze and reversal. The stock index has bounced 8.7 percent off its January 6th lows after falling 31 percent from last April’s 12-month high. The Shanghai was down 39 percent from its August ‘09 post-crash high before reversing earlier this month. Hugh Hendry nailed it
Fear Factory: Jon Stewart on Foxconn
This is grim. Bill Black has the analysis; he thinks this is a criminogenic environment of control frauds
Jim O’Neill: Chinese GDP numbers are “a blow for the hard landing guys”
There has been a lot of discussion about whether China’s growth will slow enough to be considered a hard landing and what that would mean for the global economy and investors. Below is an account from Bloomberg featuring Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jim O’Neill that is more in the soft landing camp. O’Neill also talks about the European sovereign debt crisis and Greece
Anti-employee Control Fraud
Apple has released a report on working conditions in its suppliers’ factories. It highlights a form of control fraud that criminology has identified but rarely discussed. I write overwhelmingly about accounting control fraud because it drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The primary intended victims of accounting control frauds are the shareholders and the creditors. Other private sector control frauds target customers (e.g., George Akerlof’s 1970 article on “lemons”), and the public (e.g., the unlawful disposal of toxic waste, illegal logging, and tax fraud)
China GDP grows at 8.9% in quarter through December 2011
That’s a full percentage lower than Q1 2011. So clearly the Chinese economy has slowed in reaction to both global slowing and the Chinese authorities’ attempts to cool asset and price inflation
Protecting wealth in a world of recurring crisis
Happy Wednesday. I know the news is ‘less good’ today than it was when I last wrote you but writing these weeklies always puts me in a more positive frame of mind. Nevertheless, today’s topic is about downside risk. My hope is to frame the economic scenario globally and then to offer some strategies of mitigating what I believe is significant downside investment risk
Poll: Can China avoid a hard landing?
There are a lot of different opinions on this one. What’s yours
Chart of the Day: The Shanghai Bounce
The Shanghai has put in its best two day performance since September ’09, rising 5.8 percent. After its post crash peak in August 2009, Chinese stocks have fallen almost 40 percent before hitting their lows last Friday
If no trade reversal now, then when?
The best resolution, and the one Keynes urged without success on the US in the 1920s and 1930s, is that Germany take steps to reverse its trade surplus. It could boost disposable household income and household consumption by cutting income and consumption taxes. If Germany imposes austerity, unemployment will force the peripheral countries into the unenviable choice either of absorbing that surge in unemployment themselves, or of forcing the unemployment back onto the core countries by abandoning the currency that is at the heart of their lack of competitiveness