Just in, credit rating agency, Moody’s Investor Services, has downgraded China’s property sector to negative from stable, citing both falling property sales and prices [my emphasis]: Hong Kong, April 14, 2011 — In a new report, Moody’s Investors Service changes its outlook for the China property sector to negative from stable. The change reflects the
On new years day of this year the Chinese government announced that it had a new plan for housing China’s central government will strengthen its campaign to control soaring housing prices in 2011, a senior official said on Wednesday. Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Jiang Weixin told a national work conference that the government will
Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai and the former Morgan Stanley chief Asia-Pacific economist, yesterday published an excellent article in Caixin warning that an inefficient public sector and negative real interest rates are pushing China towards stagflation, instability and a possible financial crisis (h/t interest.co.nz). Xie’s article more or less supports earlier warnings
Below find the executive summary of a new report into China’s housing bubble from The Economist Intelligence Unit. It has some terrific stats and is well worth your time, even though its analysis and conclusion add up to the intensely suspicious conclusion that ‘this time it’s different’. One particular claim I’ll take umbrage with is
From Nouriel Roubini at RGE Monitor: I’m writing on the heels of two trips to China during which I met with senior policy makers, bank executives and academics, just as the government launched its 12th Five-Year Plan, intended to rebalance the long-term growth model. My meetings deepened my own impression and RGE’s long-standing house view of
Exclusively from Michale Pettis’ newsletter: Three months ago during their 2010 Q4 conference, the PBoC said that they believed that the global economic recovery would continue in 2011, although they acknowledged a great deal of uncertainty. The PBoC also said that stabilizing the price level was their top priority, and the central bank planned to
Analyst presentations can be tedious affairs, often an equal mix of the obvious and the dubious. But one I saw about China’s Five Year Plan’s implications of Australia really had me listening closely. The visiting China-based analyst was showing a slide of the projections of the growth in “low carbon” energy out to 2015. It
At last, a good news story on China. Readers might remember that I posted an article in December showing alarming satellite photos of entire cities laying vacant (see China’s empty cities). In that article appeared the below photo of Zhengzhou New District, which was supposedly “China’s biggest ghost city, complete with entire blocks of totally
` Exclusively from Michael Pettis newsletter: Quite a few numbers came out this week, but none of them were especially dramatic or likely to change anyone’s mind about anything. The most interesting thing to me is that there are indications that, once again, the economy may be slowing quickly. Every time Beijing gets worried about too
The pressure is growing for China to open up its capital markets as a way to solve its internal bubbles. The question is: how will that affect the rest of the world? The greatest impact of China – its massive scale – is so far largely confined to trade and global production chains. What happens if
Exclusively from Michael Pettis’ newsletter: It seems the weird period of money-market tightening seems to have abated, at least for now. My SWS colleague Chen Long tells me the following: The PBoC has injected liquidity through open market operations for the 16th consecutive week. The central bank issued RMB 1 billion in 3-month bills and RMB
From Michael Pettis’ exclusive newsletter: Last week the National Bureau of Statistics released inflation data for the month of January: In January 2011, consumer price index rose by 4.9 percent over the same period of the previous year. Of which, urban area and rural area was up by 4.8 percent and 5.2 percent respectively; the price
The stated goal of the Hu Jintao-led Chinese government is a “harmonious society”. Perhaps that is why the word “Egypt” was blocked on certain search engines over the weekend. Multiple factors are in play in Egypt, but there is one vital similarity with China: Food inflation of a breadth and severity that few in the
