Jul 20th, 2010
In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble. The most common question is whether or not there is a threshold of debt (measured, say, against total GDP) above which [...]
Dec 26th, 2009
Since it is the Christmas holiday, and I am spending the week in southern Spain with my family, I have not been focusing too heavily on economic data and have instead been reading lots of different stuff, including Frederic Wakeman´s excellent The Fall of Imperial China, about the transition from the Qing, especially the late [...]
Three weeks ago China Daily published a pretty funny article about a recent survey on credibility that had taken place in China. According to the article, At a time when shamelessness is pervasive, we are often at loss as to who can be trusted. The five most trustworthy groups, according to a survey by the [...]
Jul 20th, 2009
I have wanted to discuss more on the real estate sector for a while even though I have to confess I am far from being an expert on the topic, and this in a market which even the experts find terribly confusing. What the real estate market is really telling us about underlying monetary conditions [...]
Mar 24th, 2009
Beijing music and art Things have been so busy that I haven’t been posting as much as I would like. Besides my increased writing commitments and the constant barrage of news, I would like to mention that over the past weekend we completed the second annual festival of experimental and avant garde music, featuring [...]
Wow! There are now rumors that Chinese net credit growth in January was substantially higher than the already-astonishing rumors of RMB 1.2 trillion I reported last week. I will get to that at the end of this entry, but I wanted first to discuss a possibly important issue related to credit intervention. It is probably [...]
The third down week in a row had the SSE Composite finishing with a 1.1% loss Thursday and a 1.9% loss Friday, to close at 1840. Checking the historical data provided by Bloomberg indicates that we have to go back nearly two years, to November 2006, right around the beginning of the ferocious Chinese bull [...]
Oct 19th, 2008
After the globally coordinated rescue package was announced Monday the Chinese stock markets boomed in sympathy with the rest of the world, with the SSE Composite closing up 3.6% for the day. Tuesday the SSE Composite shot up 3.5% within minutes of opening, but the party was already over in China. Over the rest of [...]
Sep 23rd, 2008
While Monday’s stock market, led by the banks, continued Friday’s big bounce back, rising 7.8% to add to Friday’s 9.5% surge, leaving us at a 2-week high (largely on buyback talk, I think), worries about the banking sector actually seemed to be deepening. Today, perhaps in response, the stock market was a lot more confused, [...]
Sep 21st, 2008
As everyone by now knows, a massive intervention Thursday by the Fed and the US Treasury, which the Financial Times calls “the most extensive peacetime expansion of the role of government in the financial system since the Great Depression,” and seemingly coordinated world-wide, caused a huge rally in global stock markets. Chinese markets were no [...]