China Economy

Suddenly hard. From China Law Blog: File this one under “just when I thought I had seen/heard everything.” A month ago (exactly) we wrote about how it is getting a lot tougher to get money out of China.

Karen Maley does it today: What to make of China?

From Goldman: January’s credit data was exceedingly strong.

Via FTAlphaville comes this barn-burning interview with Michael Pettis.

Lordy!

From the new Westpac China Resources Quarterly comes the unlucky 13 charts for a sagging China: I know, rebalancing all of that.

From the FT: Chinese companies and residents sent more than $110bn out of the country in January alone, according to new estimates, as they continued to evade tightening capital controls amid another round of market turmoil.

Cross-posted from Investing in Chinese Stocks.

Cross-posted from Investing in Chinese Stocks.

The PBOC announced its forex reserve position yesterday and it came in roughly as expected with another big fall for December 0f -$99.5 billion to $3.23 trillion continuing the trend of the past six months from the WSJ: It’s not a number that is likely to either spook or support markets.

From the WSJ: China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, has just signed a deal to buy U.S.

From Bloomberg: China set a range for its economic growth target for the first time in two decades, saying the world’s second-largest economy would expand 6.5 percent to 7 percent this year, slower than last year’s goal of about 7 percent.

From Senor Bloombergo: Moving to plug one popular way for moving money out of China, the currency regulator is imposing restrictions on buying insurance products overseas, people with knowledge of the matter said Tuesday.

From the SCMP (chart from Zero Hedge): The recent withdrawals of government land sales as a result of poor bids and the return of negative-equity homeowners are adding to strains in a rapidly weakening Hong Kong property market, with analysts saying developers will be forced to cut prices aggressively to stay afloat.

From Macquarie today: Is the economy in a hard landing?

From the WSJ: Some of the biggest names in the hedge-fund industry are piling up bets against China’s currency, setting up a showdown between Wall Street and the leaders of the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s PMIs are out and are again weak.

From Macquarie: In the latest iteration of its widely used estimates of global growth and productivity, the Conference Board (CB) has adopted an alternative computation of China’s GDP as its base case.

The AFR reports today on another dodgy Chinese real estate deal Downunder: The former chairman of a Chinese bank is being investigated for taking “huge bribes”, which allegedly funded the purchase of two Australian properties and enabled a transfer of $6 million to his wife in Sydney.