Feb 22nd, 2010
It is a real toss-up as to which generates more bizarre comment in the international press: Beijing’s long-feared dumping of US Treasuries, or the use and value of the PBoC’s central bank reserves. The revelation last week that Chinese holdings of US Treasury obligations fell in December by $34.2 billion, to $755.4 billion, generated a [...]
Feb 2nd, 2010
I am traveling in DC, NY and Boston over the next few days, and between meetings and jet-lag it is hard for me to do much on my blog, but I did want to extend a short piece I wrote that was published yesterday in the South China Morning Post. This is because it is [...]
Apr 13th, 2009
Exports in March dropped a less-than-expected 17.1% from the same time last year – below expectations of 20% and the 21.1% drop for the first two months of 2009. Most of the articles I read in the Chinese and foreign press including, not surprisingly, comments from the customs bureau, hailed this as a sign that [...]
Mar 17th, 2009
The market (or at least that part of the market that obsesses over balance of payment flows) has been swept with rumors today that foreign exchange reserves were down in January by $30 billion. My experience with these sorts of rumors is that they tend to be fairly accurate, and I suspect they will soon [...]
Jan 21st, 2009
I have been on the road for the past few (and next ten) days, in part because of Spring Festival, so I haven’t been able to post as much as I normally do, but I was asked to write an article for a Chinese magazine, which I recently finished, on comparisons between today and the [...]
Between the holiday slowdown and the number of writing commitments I have it has been a little too easy to neglect my blog. What free time I have has been spent reading, and I am reading for the third time what I think is one of the best books ever written on financial history – [...]
Nov 23rd, 2008
Fareed Zakaria usually writes very interesting pieces on international policy issues, but it seems to me that there is so much mystery about how the global balance of payments works that he, like so many others, makes simplifying assumptions that don’t take the balance into account, and for that reason just don’t make sense. In [...]
Nov 8th, 2008
I always seem to be traveling when exciting things are happening. I just got back this morning from four days in Paris, where I had to go for our annual Board of Directors meeting (and took the opportunity in addition to meet a number of investors and government officials), and so I was in a [...]
Aug 15th, 2008
The stock market had its best day in a long time, with the SSE Composite rising 7.6% on the day to close at 2522. Most of the run-up came in the morning, and several financial sector firms, which were the best performers, had to stop trading when they hit their 10% price-change limit, suggesting that [...]
There is an interesting, if perhaps predictable, June 17 Bloomberg article by Patricia Lui that discusses China’s holding of US dollar reserves. According to the article: China is adding to its holdings of U.S. assets, data from the U.S. government showed yesterday, easing concern the Asian nation will sell dollar investments. Total holdings of [...]