China Economy

Cross-posted from Kate Mackenzie at FTAlphaville.

ANZ offers  a useful guide to why Chinese trade numbers are getting whack: China’s trade growth remained strong in April, following a surge in the past two quarters.

China’s April trade data is out and will confound just about everyone with a ripping 14.7% growth in exports versus 9.2% expected and 16.8% for imports versus 13% expected.

Cross-posted from Kate Mackenzie at FTAlphaville.

China has thrown up a curly one this morning with the HSBC services PMI weakening sharply in April: April data signalled an increased amount of business activity in the Chinese service sector.

Exclusively from Michael Pettis’ latest newsletter: In a recent publication Citibank has an interesting graph on the relationship between total social financing (a broader measure of debt than simply RMB loans in the banking system) and GDP.

China’s official PMI for April is out and fell marginally to 50.6 points from 50.9 in March.

Damn, it’s a rough wake-up call for the nation today (and the hapless KGB).

Cross-posted from FTAlphaville. China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s top decision-making group, held a special session yesterday to discuss the economy — apparently the first time they’ve held this sort of economy-focused meeting since 2004, according to Xu Gao at China Everbright Securities (via Bloomberg).

Cross-posted from FTAlphaville.

Cross-posted from FTAlphaville.

By Leith van Onselen Below is an interesting PowerPoint presentation from Jim Chanos, founder and president of New York investment company Kynikos Associates, which accompanied a speech Chanos gave at the 2013 Wine Country Conference on 5 April 2013.

From Bloomie: So maybe that’s where all that credit is going?

Cross-posted from FTAlphaville.

Cross-posted from FTAlphaville.

Our favourite China observer, Westpac’s Phat Dragon, today feigns humility before blaming Chinese data manipulation for yesterday’s big GDP miss. In true Australian fashion, the AFR embraces this easy excuse without pause (find the full report below).

From ANZ, here are a couple of useful charts of the internals of Chinese growth.

So, here are the charts for China’s first quarter growth miss.

Chinese first quarter growth is out and missed big coming in 1.6% only, 6.4% annualised.