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Fathom China
Matthew Forney
Oct 07th 2014
Profile: Great Wall Motor: Off The Road
Great Wall Motor was once considered China’s most promising private car company. It had an excellent reputation, a strong and charismatic founder, a strong position in the fast-growing market for SUVs, and a head start in exporting cars to developed markets. Today, Great Wall risks losing its way.
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Gavekal Research
Arthur Kroeber
Oct 06th 2014
The Hong Kong Endgame
Today, after a week of excitement, the democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong have largely fizzled out—at least for now. As the city returned to work on Monday morning, the remaining protesters did not try to prevent civil servants from reaching their offices in the government’s downtown headquarters. By midday the numbers outside the complex had dwindled to just a few scores, down from the many tens of thousands that had jammed surrounding...
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Gavekal Research
Research Team
Oct 01st 2014
Five Corners (1 October): The Energy Selloff
Overview: Louis looks at the decline in oil prices and wonders whether the genesis can be found back in May when the leaders of China and Russia met for an historic summit.
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Gavekal Research
Michael Komesaroff
Sep 30th 2014
Dr Copper Comes A Cropper
It’s been a brutal year for commodities. Slower growth in China, and stalled economies in Europe and Japan, have eroded end-user demand even as the prospect of higher interest rates in the US has blunted investor appetite for zero-yield assets. At the same time the heavy investment of recent years is now bringing new sources of supply to market. In response, the S&P GSCI commodity index is down -7.2% over the year to date. Even copper, long...
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Gavekal Research
Tom Holland
Sep 29th 2014
Hong Kong's Democracy Protests
The inhabitants of Hong Kong were treated over the weekend to the unusual spectacle of police battling political protesters in the city’s streets. Baton charges and volleys of tear gas might be common enough tactics in New York or London, but not in Asia’s leading international financial center. The rapid escalation of the protests over the weekend and the police’s strong-arm response shocked locals, and triggered a -2% fall in the city’s...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Rosealea Yao
Sep 29th 2014
Property Digs A Deeper Hole
China’s local governments held a party for the housing market, but no one came. Most major cities (with some exceptions including Beijing and Shanghai) have rolled back measures restricting housing purchases since June, but housing sales are still weak. Previously, we had argued that the combination of a pickup in credit growth and the relaxation of purchase restrictions would help the downturn in property sales find a bottom relatively soon (...
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Gavekal Research
Andrew Batson
Sep 26th 2014
5C China: The Losers From Lower Energy Prices
China should cheer a decline in global energy prices: as the world’s largest consumer of coal and second-largest consumer of oil, cheaper energy cuts its import bill and gives consumers and businesses more money to spend on other things. But falling energy prices have in fact brought significant pain to parts of the country.
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Gavekal Research
Louis Gave
Sep 26th 2014
5C Overview: A Changed Energy Dynamic
As we see it the big developments impacting the global economy over the summer would roughly run as follows:
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Gavekal Research
Louis Gave
Sep 26th 2014
The Rise In Volatility
First it was the foreign exchange markets, then commodities, followed by fixed income markets. Now it’s the equity markets. Wherever we look, volatility has been creeping higher. To some extent, this is not surprising. At the end of the US Federal Reserve’s first round of quantitative easing, and at the end of QE2, the markets wobbled. So with QE3 now winding to a close (and with the ECB still behind the curve), a period of uncertainty and...
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Gavekal Research
Long Chen
Sep 25th 2014
Learning To Live Without Zhou Xiaochuan
For the past few weeks Beijing has been buzzing with rumors that Zhou Xiaochuan, the head of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) for more than a decade, will step down in coming months. We do not know if these rumors are true, but what is clear is that even if Zhou does not leave this year, his time left in office is limited. Zhou has already passed the customary retirement age and has stayed in office only through an unusual bureaucratic dodge....
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Gavekal Research
Long Chen
Sep 24th 2014
The PBOC Hangs Tough
These are nervous times for global investors as volatility creeps back into asset markets and growth indicators disappoint—witness recent sharp declines in commodity prices and currencies such as the Australian dollar. The eurozone economy continues to weaken as shown by yesterday’s soft French PMI, Japan is moribund and China, while far from collapsing, continues to slow. Given the Federal Reserve’s tightening bias and a continued failure to...
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Gavekal Research
Joyce Poon
Sep 22nd 2014
Asia Can Handle A Strong Dollar
Can emerging markets handle a strong US dollar? This is a crucial question for investors in emerging Asia since an appreciating dollar has often spelt trouble for the region’s markets. The worry is that the dollar now looks to be on a secular strengthening trend with the DXY up 6% since July 1. For its part, the MSCI Asia ex-Japan index has lost 3% in less than two weeks.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Long Chen
Sep 22nd 2014
Accepting The Inevitable
Weakening growth pushed China’s reform-minded government into some reluctant and half-hearted stimulus measures earlier this year. But the effect of the “mini-stimulus” was in fact pretty minimal, and growth has since turned downward again. In the latest installment of our China Macro Chartbook, we summarize the state of the economy in a few well-chosen slides. Current signs point to the government becoming somewhat more accepting of the...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Andrew Batson, Ernan Cui
Sep 18th 2014
The Genesis Of The Capitalist Farmer
The world’s biggest farm is running out of farmers. So to continue its impressive record of boosting agricultural production, China needs to change how it raises crops—shifting from techniques that rely on lots of labor to ones that use more capital and technology. If this structural transformation is going to happen, China will need a sustained boom in agricultural capital spending.
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Gavekal Research
Research Team
Sep 17th 2014
Five Corners (17 September): World Bond Markets
In our latest bi-weekly review of global economics, we take a searching look at the state of global bond markets. As the US Federal Reserve inches closer to a tightening bias, bond investors must climb a wall of fear. Recent weeks have seen yields rise globally. The issue is whether this represents a nervous short-term move or a bigger shift in the cycle. Gavekal Dragonomics analysts consider the picture from the major economic regions.
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Gavekal Research
Charles Gave
Sep 17th 2014
How To Game A Rigged Market
Markets are on alert in a week that could see more great insights from the gods of central banking on high. Investors seem a little spooked with the MSCI emerging markets index off 4% in the last eight trading days, while currency volatility has picked up as the US dollar has strengthened. And yet despite these minor ructions, there remains a deeper sense of calm. It is the sort of quiescence born of insiders’ knowledge that the nature of...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Long Chen
Sep 15th 2014
So Much For China's Mini-Stimulus
So much for the ‘mini-stimulus’. The data on China’s economic performance in August released over the weekend were dismal, showing a significant and unexpected decline in growth. The boost from the government’s suite of supportive policies was always going to be temporary, but renewed weakness is appearing much sooner than expected. We had previously thought that policy could keep growth stable for a couple of quarters (see Fears For China’s...
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Gavekal Research
Sep 12th 2014
5C Overview: Weatherproofing Bond Portfolios
For much of this year bond investors have been in ‘risk-on’ mode. When in April the European Central Bank first hinted it was preparing to embark on its own unconventional easing measures, investors concluded that with all the world’s major central banks now offering a put on growth, it was safe to head out in search of extra yield. Global bond markets duly rallied across the board, with volatility falling to near-record lows.
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Gavekal Research
Louis Gave
Sep 12th 2014
Behind The RMB's Strength
When Michael Milken invented junk bonds in the early 1980s, few foresaw that his new market would change the way companies financed themselves. Nor did they think it would alter how businesses looked at their cost of capital, trigger an M&A boom, midwife the birth of the private equity industry or change the way banks were run. However, with hindsight, it is obvious that the creation of junk bonds was one of the most important financial...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Sep 12th 2014
Korea Thriving In China's Chilly Investment Climate
Many multinational companies are under pressure in China, facing a slowing economy and slowing sales, as well as increased regulatory scrutiny. This is beginning to show up in business plans: annual surveys of American and European businesses by their Beijing-based chambers of commerce show that while China still ranks as a top-three global investment priority, more and more companies are scaling back their expansion plans. For Japanese...
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