Gavekal Research
September 18, 2018
Donald Trump’s administration has upped the ante in its trade war with China, imposing tariffs on an additional US$200bn of Chinese imports. The tariffs will take effect on September 24 at a rate of 10%, rising to 25% at the beginning of 2019 unless some kind of a deal can be worked out with Beijing. The chances of a deal are vanishingly small.
Gavekal Dragonomics
September 15, 2018
The number eight is traditionally a lucky number for Chinese. Exporters could be forgiven for not believing in that tradition: 2018 looks like it will join 1998 and 2008 as a year in which exports suffer a major shock. In this piece, Andrew evaluates the state of the economy as the US prepares more tariffs, and how China can manage the impact.
Gavekal Dragonomics
September 13, 2018
China’s government is worried about slowing growth, but also does not want to give up on financial de-risking. To balance these priorities, it has devised a new tool: “special-purpose” bonds issued by local governments. In this piece, Chen Long explains how this new way of funding infrastructure will work, and how much stimulus it can deliver.
Gavekal Research
August 21, 2018
Events of the past few weeks have lowered the risk of the worst-case scenario of a trade-war-on-all-fronts that Arthur laid out earlier this summer. But although officials in both the US and China are eyeing a truce, no bilateral deal can be nailed down until the two countries’ presidents meet in November, after the US midterm elections.
Gavekal Research
August 6, 2018
China wants to show that it will stand up to US threats to escalate the trade war. Yet Yanmei argues that it has few attractive policy choices. It can neither back down from the confrontation nor retaliate enough to deter the US. With little prospect of a negotiated solution in the near term, Beijing is focused on stabilizing the domestic economy.
Gavekal Research
July 24, 2018
Will we see any break in the escalation of Trump’s trade wars this year—either because one of the targets capitulates and tries to strike a deal with the US, or because blowback within the US against the negative impact of trade wars gets strong enough that Trump needs to beat a tactical retreat? The answer is a firm no, on both counts.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 14, 2018
China's data releases for July showed that the easing measures of the last few months have yet to have an impact on the real economy, with industrial value-added, fixed-asset investment and retail sales all slowing. Further monetary easing measures will follow.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 9, 2018
China this year ordered central SOEs to bring down their asset-liability ratio down by 2pp by 2020. That might sound like a modest change, but it means doing much more deleveraging in the next two years than in the last two. With policymakers now starting to ease policy, this aggressive hard target for deleveraging will likely become a soft one.
Gavekal Dragonomics
July 18, 2018
If you believe China’s official statistics on fixed-asset investment, then capital spending is now collapsing across the country. But you probably shouldn’t believe those numbers, for reasons that Andrew explains in this piece. True growth in investment spending will slow in 2018, but much less catastrophically than the headline data suggest.
Gavekal Research
August 1, 2018
The momentum for a weaker renminbi is considerable, with the US ratcheting up its trade war with China and the Chinese government moving to easier fiscal and monetary policies. But Chen Long argues that the renminbi’s downside from current levels may prove limited even though the central bank is unlikely to intervene as much as it did in 2015-16.
Gavekal Dragonomics
July 25, 2018
As China’s government shifts economic policy more explicitly into easing mode, will it relieve the growing strains in the corporate bond market? In this piece, Chen Long diagnoses the underlying causes of a recent wave of defaults that have spooked investors, and explains how the government is changing policy to ease that financial stress.
Gavekal Research
July 4, 2018
After its biggest downward move since 2015, where is the renminbi headed next? Since mid-June it has fallen by over -4% against the US dollar to CNY6.63, and the trade-weighted CFETS index has also declined by -3% from its June peak. This has led to some commentary that China is pushing down its currency to prepare for a trade war with the US.
Gavekal Dragonomics
September 6, 2018
While China’s government is talking tough about containing its frothy property market, the market does not appear to be listening. Housing sales are still growing, price rises are accelerating and construction activity is robust. In this piece, Rosealea explains why property has outperformed, and updates her outlook for the rest of 2018.
Gavekal Dragonomics
July 26, 2018
The long decline in China’s housing inventories—the key factor driving the recovery in construction—now seems to have ended. After falling in 2015, 2016 and 2017, housing inventories are now on pace to end 2018 slightly higher. In this piece, Rosealea explains why this change will not spell the end of the construction cycle just yet.
Gavekal Dragonomics
July 13, 2018
China’s real-estate developers are getting hammered in stock and credit markets. But the largest of these firms are well-placed to ride out current strains, and are the main beneficiaries of accelerating consolidation and government policy. As the Chinese property market matures, the winners are likely to be a small group of the largest companies.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 23, 2018
In the past years, billions of dollars of Chinese venture capital have poured into US tech firms. This is alarming to the US Defense Department, which believes these investments could lead to a flow of critical technology back to China, eroding the American advantage in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 16, 2018
China’s government is making a determined effort to co-opt private technology companies to help modernize its military. The pressure to support this drive, known as “military-civil fusion,” creates new political risks for tech companies and their investors: they could face more Chinese government interference and a political backlash from abroad.
Gavekal Dragonomics
July 9, 2018
Xiaomi and other Chinese smartphone makers are among the first Chinese consumer-goods companies to have gained significant market share outside of China. In this piece, Dan explains where their success has come from and assesses their prospects: Chinese smartphones may not displace Apple and Samsung, but can limit their gains in emerging markets.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 28, 2018
This technical note explains why the retail sales growth numbers reported by the National Bureau of Statistics are so much higher than the growth rates one can calculate by comparing this year's sales values with last year's. This is not an effort to cover up bad economic performance by fudging statistics, but the opposite.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 28, 2018
Consumer spending has been the ballast of China's economy over the past six years. But this year its resilience has been questioned, thanks to a sharp fall-off in automobile sales and reported growth rates in retail sales that appeared to bear no relationship to the underlying data.
Gavekal Dragonomics
June 20, 2018
China’s rapid shift to online shopping is emptying malls and forcing retailers to close hundreds of stores. But at the same time, the big internet companies are investing billions to seek new growth from brick-and-mortar stores. In this piece, Ernan explains how Chinese retail is restructuring and where the growth opportunities are.
Gavekal Research
July 11, 2018
Chinese equities have finally had a few solid trading sessions after their steep decline in the latter half of June. But the CSI 300 index is still down -14% year-to-date, and betting on a rebound from here looks unwise.
Gavekal Dragonomics
January 29, 2018
2017 was a great year for China’s industrial sector, with profits up 21%, but the gains were highly concentrated in mining, metals and materials. This pattern has a mix of important consequences, as Thomas explains in this piece: it’s good news for financial risk, less good news for households, and bad news for corporate investment.
Gavekal Dragonomics
January 9, 2018
Amid the ups and downs of China's recent investment cycles, one trend has stayed constant: the slowdown in private-sector investment. In this piece, Thomas shows that a key problem is state firms routinely delaying payments to their private suppliers, forcing them to hold huge reserves of working capital that can’t be productively invested.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 24, 2018
North China is gearing up for big cuts in heavy industry output this winter, in a repeat effort to clean up the skies over Beijing. This campaign will, by constraining supply and raising costs, exert steady upward pressure on metals prices. In the long run, it will encourage producers to move to other regions, redrawing China’s industrial map.
Gavekal Dragonomics
April 4, 2018
It’s been a wild winter for China’s steel industry, with huge swings in output and prices. The main culprit is the aggressive official campaign to reduce air pollution—and the industry’s creative responses to it. Their back-and-forth has not hurt underlying growth much, but the resulting volatility in steel prices is not going away.
Gavekal Dragonomics
March 28, 2018
The rebound in commodity prices since 2016 has been a boon for much of China’s industrial sector—but coal-burning power plants have been big losers. Coal prices cannot go much higher without causing serious financial distress. This means that policy should now be shifting to favor power producers, by ensuring coal prices do not climb further.
Gavekal Dragonomics
September 10, 2018
China’s healthcare reforms have created new opportunities for global pharmaceutical firms and made healthcare a favored sector for many investors. But as Ernan explains, the government’s top priority these days is controlling healthcare costs, especially drug prices. That trend makes it trickier to profit from China’s healthcare growth story.
Gavekal Dragonomics
May 23, 2018
The story of China’s urbanization has long been the migration of people from the country to the cities. Not anymore: as Ernan explains, rural migration has slowed sharply, and is being replaced by the reclassification of rural areas into urban ones. Policymakers now prefer this “local urbanization,” even though it delivers less income growth.
Gavekal Dragonomics
March 20, 2018
China’s legislature has approved the creation of a national “supervision” system, an arm of government equal to the executive, legislative and judicial branches that is charged with overseeing the vast public sector. As Yanmei explains, the new system transforms Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption crusade into something even more ambitious.
Gavekal Research
June 13, 2018
After the Trump-Kim summit, North Korea's commitment to denuclearization still remains a fiction. Future negotiations will be mostly about stringing along the US administration. While Washington and Pyongyang talk, Beijing and Seoul will continue to try to normalize the existence of a nuclear-armed North Korea and cement peace.
Gavekal Dragonomics
June 7, 2018
Ominous clouds are gathering over Taiwan, as China steps up displays of military force and its campaign of international isolation. Could this escalate into a replay of the 1995-6 Taiwan Strait crisis, or something even worse? In this piece, Yanmei assesses the rising risks, but argues that military conflict is still a remote possibility.
Gavekal Dragonomics
May 9, 2018
It is still possible that the US and China will strike a deal to avert threatened tariffs. But as Arthur argues in this piece, any deal will be mostly cosmetic. The tension between the two is not mainly about trade, but about China’s challenge to US global dominance. The US will almost certainly keep trying to counter China’s efforts to gain power.
Gavekal Dragonomics
November 28, 2017
In our annual review of the Chinese consumer, Ernan outlines the short-term outlook and longer-term trends in household spending. This chartbook explains why consumption growth has been a bit disappointing in 2017, why the outlook for 2018 is better, what are the drivers of consumption upgrading, and how the transition to online is playing out.
Gavekal Dragonomics
November 2, 2017
In her annual overview, Rosealea summarizes the outlook for the housing market and construction activity in China. This concise chartbook reviews the drivers of growth in 2017, digs into the key indicators and explains the core scenario for 2018: a modest correction in housing sales and prices, and a gradual slowdown in construction activity.
Gavekal Dragonomics
August 17, 2017
This chartbook outlines the recent core trends in China’s corporate sector. There has been a major rebound in revenues and profits, but most firms are using this to repair balance sheets rather than boost capex. So leverage is down and debt servicing ability is up. But the profit cycle is now likely at its peak, as is firms’ ability to deleverage.
Gavekal Research
July 17, 2018
China has an ambitious industrial upgrading plan, called Made in China 2025, which targets Chinese leadership in about 30 technological segments. In this video interview Dan explains how the government aims to achieve this, how this plan differs from previous Chinese policy goals, and whether it is likely to succeed.
Gavekal Research
July 12, 2018
In this call Arthur Kroeber outlined his view on why President Donald Trump’s trade war is not a bluff, and is likely to escalate ahead of the US midterm elections in November; Andrew Batson explained the macro-level effects caused by all this uncertainty; and Chen Long discussed the market impacts in China and the country’s likely response.
Gavekal Research
April 18, 2018
During yesterday’s monthly call, Arthur Kroeber addressed rising geoeconomic and geopolitical tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.