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Gavekal Dragonomics
Arthur Kroeber, Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - A Portrait Of China's Gilded Age
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - One-Child Policy, Foreign Companies
Relaxing The One-Child Policy: Too Late, Too Little
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Research Team, Long Chen
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - The Winding Road To Interest Rate Liberalization
Bank deposit rates are among the last major controlled prices in China. To keep the economy humming, they need to be deregulated. This will require deposit insurance, a new policy interest rate—and a plan to avert financial crisis.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Tom Miller, Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - China's Expanding Empire In Laos
China’s economic influence in Southeast Asia is rising, and smaller countries in the region must figure out how to extract maximum benefit without becoming vassal states.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - Aid To Africa: Helpful Or Harmful?
Critics have long argued that Chinese aid to Africa is self-interested and perhaps even harmful for African states. A close study of the data suggests the truth is much more complicated.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - America, Land Of Opportunity
China’s outward direct investment is rising rapidly, and the United States is getting a bigger share of those flows—US$14 bn last year. But unless China opens its own doors wider to foreign investment, a political backlash could emerge.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Arthur Kroeber, Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - How Much Pain For How Much Gain
Economic growth is slowing, structural reform has only just begun, and a severe anti-corruption campaign is sowing fear and uncertainty.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Tom Miller, Research Team
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - More Deals, More Players
The face of China’s outward investment is changing: state-owned firms still pour plenty of money into big-ticket resource deals, but private firms are rapidly catching up, investing in consumer goods, technology and services. And developed countries, not emerging markets, are the big beneficiaries.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Erica Downs
Jun 01st 2014
CEQ Q2 2014 - Whatever Became Of China, Inc.?
Some used to worry that “China, Inc.”—Chinese resource companies, state-owned banks and government agencies working in concert—would “lock up” energy and mineral resources around the world. Those fears proved misplaced, thanks to miscues by Chinese firms and changing market conditions.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Wang Feng
Jun 01st 2014
Rethinking The One-Child Policy: Too Little, Too Late
Relaxing the one-child policy has emerged as the most concrete and popular policy change following the Third Plenum meeting in November 2013. Yet the initial public reaction has been lukewarm, and there is no chance of a new baby boom. The policy change both came too late and was too little to change the nation’s demographic trajectory.
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Gavekal Research
Andrew Batson
May 30th 2014
China Becomes A Willing Seller
Tea-leaf reading is all the rage in Beijing again. With a deepening correction in the housing market promising to significantly drag on China’s growth this year, every utterance of the political leadership is being parsed for clues as to how and when the government might respond. The tone does seem to be changing: Premier Li Keqiang this week has repeated his usual bromides on “fine-tuning” policy as necessary, but without his previous emphasis...
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Gavekal Research
Louis Gave
May 29th 2014
Drumroll To The ECB Meeting
Yesterday the yield on 10-year US treasury bonds broke downward through 2.5%, its floor ever since last summer’s ‘taper tantrum’. There were two main catalysts for the move. First, there was renewed weakness in the renminbi, as the offshore CNH set a new low for the year with US$-CNH rising to 6.27. Second, there was poor data from Germany and, especially, France, where the ranks of the unemployed continued to expand. Looking at the evolution of...
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Gavekal Research
Arthur Kroeber, Will Denyer, Joyce Poon, Tan Kai Xian, Nick Andrews, Long Chen
May 28th 2014
Five Corners (28 May 2014)
In the latest bi-weekly review of global economics and investment:
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Gavekal Research
Joyce Poon
May 27th 2014
The Earnings Expectations Paradox
When it comes to global equity investment, all markets are not equal. Over the last couple of years, investors have evolved distinctly different attitudes about how to discount trends in profit growth in each of the four major equity market regions.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Research Team, Long Chen
May 27th 2014
Testing The Reformers’ Resolve
The outlook for China’s growth this year is deteriorating, thanks to a deepening correction in the property market. This will test the government’s stated desire to focus on structural reforms rather than once again stimulating growth. In this concise presentation, we summarize our current views on the economy and policy. Much depends on how extended the downturn in property is: with a contained cyclical correction, the government is unlikely to...
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Gavekal Research
Research Team
May 22nd 2014
A Grand Bargain
In the run up to this week’s meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, expectations had run high that 20 years of discussions could be concluded with an agreement for Russia to pipe natural gas to China. Russia’s deputy energy minister even stated last week that a contract was “98% ready.” The long history of inconclusive China-Russia negotiations on the issue suggested that his was an overly optimistic...
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Gavekal Research
Arthur Kroeber
May 22nd 2014
5C Overview: Keeping China In Check
How much should we worry about China’s increasing assertiveness beyond its borders? Provocations continue to pile up in maritime Asia, most recently a spat over a Chinese oil rig in what Vietnam considers to be its waters. And last week’s Xi Jinping-Vladimir Putin summit in Shanghai, capped by the signing of a long-delayed US$400 bn gas pipeline deal, conjured the specter of a Sino-Russian concert enabling both countries to defy the United...
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Gavekal Research
Anatole Kaletsky
May 22nd 2014
A Grandmaster At Work
“Check-mate”. As Vladimir Putin signed Russia’s historic US$400bn gas-supply agreement with China, he must have felt the satisfaction of a chess grandmaster revealing the inexorable outcome of a complicated endgame. In theory, the next phase of the chess game between Russia and the West in Ukraine will only begin with the Ukrainian presidential election on Sunday, but Putin’s positioning of the pieces means the outcome is preordained, whoever...
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Gavekal Research
Long Chen
May 22nd 2014
5C China: A Dysfunctional Market, And Far Too Small
Last week, the Ministry of Finance gave permission for 10 local governments to issue bonds worth RMB109bn directly to the market. At first this looks like a breakthrough for fiscal reform. But it is too early to celebrate. The approved issuance is small, even compared with the RMB400bn quota in this year’s budget, and the initiative is beset by problems.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Rosealea Yao, Thomas Gatley
May 21st 2014
The Culprits Behind The Housing Correction
With this year’s correction in the Chinese housing market spreading, the search for the villain of the piece is on. Most market analysts were primed to expect problems in the numerous small, isolated cities that have overbuilt housing and are swimming in excess inventories. Both our own research and much other analysis has shown that smaller cities have serious problems, thanks to an unhappy combination of weak population growth and government-...
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Gavekal Research
Charles Gave
May 20th 2014
A Supply-Sider’s View Of China
Let’s conduct a simplified thought experiment. Imagine a country where there are two types of capex: capital spending used for building infrastructure and capital spending deployed in favor of other private sector activity. By rights, money should go to those projects with the higher return on invested capital. The problem is that most returns from infrastructure accrue to third party users of the asset (so called “externalities”) and not to its...
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Gavekal Research
Tom Miller
May 16th 2014
How To Lose The Eastern Front
Russia, it appears, has emerged victorious in Ukraine. After the unofficial referendums organized by pro-Russian groups in Ukraine’s eastern regions, Kiev knows it must negotiate with the separatists to avoid national disintegration. A deal on autonomy for parts of Donetsk and Luhansk will have to be made on terms acceptable to Vladimir Putin.
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Gavekal Research
Joyce Poon
May 15th 2014
The Case For (Some) Emerging Markets
Investors in emerging markets need to focus on three main things: nominal GDP growth in US dollar terms, valuations and leverage. The problem is that over the last decade, most EMs enjoyed very strong nominal growth in US dollar terms, in which valuation and currency played a bigger role than real growth. That game has run its course and the key to success in the coming period is identifying those markets with strong real growth prospects that...
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Gavekal Research
Research Team
May 14th 2014
Five Corners (14 May 2014)
In the latest bi-weekly review of global economics and investment:
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Gavekal Research
Thomas Gatley
May 13th 2014
Constructing The Profit Cycle
As housing goes, so goes China’s economy. The last couple of painful downturns in domestic growth, in 2008 and 2012, were largely driven by downturns in housing and new construction. While real estate and construction are large sectors themselves, the real reason for this broad economic impact is how much the sales and profits of other business sectors depend on construction activity. The latest data for April—housing sales falling 16% YoY, and...
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Gavekal Research
Joyce Poon
May 12th 2014
EM Carry Trade Looks Vulnerable
Over the last two months, emerging markets have delivered a handsome rally, with the MSCI emerging markets index recording a 7% return in US dollar terms, compared with just 1% for the developed markets. The trouble is that this rally has been driven primarily by investors’ growing enthusiasm for carry trades in an environment of declining global volatility. Experience teaches this is an engine which can all too suddenly be thrown into reverse
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Gavekal Research
Andrew Batson
May 08th 2014
5C China: Clouds Gather Over Property Outlook
China’s economic indicators for April showed growth holding steady, albeit at sluggish rates, in manufacturing and consumer spending. Exports are even picking up once the data problems are dealt with. But while growth may be stable for the moment the risks of a further downturn are rising, as sales and sentiment worsen in the housing market.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Ernan Cui
May 08th 2014
The Search For Safe Food
Since the horrifying melamine scandal of 2008—when 300,000 children were sickened by milk products tainted with an industrial chemical—the safety of food in China has been in permanent crisis. Hardly a month seems to pass without a media exposé of real or exaggerated problems: pesticides in produce, banned drugs in meat, cadmium in rice, the re-use of cooking oil. The result has been a dramatic and sustained shift in Chinese consumer behavior as...
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Gavekal Research
Joyce Poon
May 08th 2014
5C Asia: Hong Kong’s Diminished Prospects
Even as Chinese growth has ebbed, Hong Kong has defied the downturn. The territory effectively has full employment and real wages have risen nicely. Over the last year, hot money flows continued to enter Hong Kong and tourists from across the border kept arriving. This, at least, was the case until recently when cracks started to appear in the prosperity of China’s preferred haven for tax-avoidance and luxury shopping.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Arthur Kroeber, Long Chen
May 07th 2014
The Renminbi Reconsidered
The fall in the renminbi over the last two months has prompted much anxiety. For the past nine years one of the few certainties of global markets was that the Chinese currency would end the year stronger (or at least no weaker) than it began. That certainty has been demolished—which indeed was the goal of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) when it engineered the depreciation. There are now two questions to consider. First, how much further might...
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Gavekal Research
Pierre Gave
May 05th 2014
Growth & Markets Monthly (May 2014)
For a second straight month, our growth indicators have weakened, suggesting the possibility of another summer lull. The outlier is US employment, as evidenced by last week’s very decent non-farm payroll report. We were also intrigued by the recent pick-up in US 5-year inflation expectations, which does not seem to fit with the narrative of constant deflationary pressures. Combined with recent US wage growth, could this imply that there is a...
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Gavekal Research
Arthur Kroeber, Will Denyer, Joyce Poon, Tan Kai Xian, Nick Andrews, Long Chen
Apr 30th 2014
Five Corners (30 April 2014)
In the latest bi-weekly review of global economics and investment, Arthur Kroeber considers the implications of Asian deflation. Will Denyer & Tan Kai Xian consider the strong rental market for US homes and wonder what this means for the broader housing sector. Nick Andrews looks up close at reduced liquidity in the eurozone’s financial system. Chen Long looks at a favorable convergence between national GDP numbers and the growth claims made...
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Gavekal Research
Will Denyer, Simon Pritchard
Apr 29th 2014
What Ails The Dollar
A curious brew of cheap money, a grinding cyclical recovery and “new economy” verisimilitude has helped drive Wall Street to new highs. And yet even as equity investors have scaled the wall of worry, the dollar has remained uninspired. The unit arguably started a structural upswing in 2008 but the recent performance has been lackluster with the DXY index at the bottom of its trading range.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Rosealea Yao
Apr 29th 2014
A Supply-Side Correction In Property
The supply side of China’s property market is looking surprisingly weak. Indicators of property developers’ desire to expand future housing supply are turning down: construction starts have fallen outright by more than 20% YoY for each of the first three months of 2014, and land purchases swung to a sharp 17% decline in March from slow growth in earlier months. This deterioration in the supply side looks out of proportion to the more gentle...
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Gavekal Research
Jim Lennon
Apr 28th 2014
Beijing’s Peruvian Copper Play
Earlier this month a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies agreed to buy a huge Peruvian copper mining project from Glencore Xstrata for US$5.9bn. The new Chinese owners will need to invest another US$2.4bn to bring the project on stream by its scheduled start date in 2015, bringing their total investment to US$8.3bn. Is this massive deal yet another example of China Inc. overpaying for resource assets? Probably not: tight global supplies...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Long Chen
Apr 28th 2014
What's Going On With The RMB?
Even though the renminbi fell steeply in the first quarter, sliding 2.7% against the US dollar, capital continued to flow heavily into China. Balance of payments data published last Friday show China’s current account surplus for the period was just US$7.3bn. The capital account, however, notched up a surplus of US$118.3bn.
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Gavekal Research
Jim Lennon
Apr 28th 2014
Beijing's Peruvian Copper Play
Earlier this month a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies agreed to buy a huge Peruvian copper mining project from Glencore Xstrata for US$5.9bn. The new Chinese owners will need to invest another US$2.4bn to bring the project on stream by its scheduled start date in 2015, bringing their total investment to US$8.3bn. Is this massive deal yet another example of China Inc. overpaying for resource assets? Probably not: tight global supplies...
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Fathom China
Matthew Forney, Research Team
Apr 24th 2014
Profile: UnionPay: Breaking The Monopoly
The way that billions of people pay for things is in flux across the world. No sooner had consumers grown accustomed to using bank cards instead of cash than the next big thing, online payments, swept onto the scene. In China, a giant state-owned firm called China UnionPay (“UnionPay”) has long straddled most payment channels as the only authorized bank card network. UnionPay is a government-controlled cousin to Visa or MasterCard, with its logo...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Long Chen
Apr 23rd 2014
Watch Capital Flows For The Central Bank’s Next Move
How will China’s central bank respond to the country’s slowing growth? Speculation about the next move from the People’s Bank of China has been rising as economic indicators continue to be tepid, credit growth continues to slow and the currency remains weak. Similarly, in early 2012 GDP growth was also weak, credit was cooling and the RMB was depreciating—and shortly afterward the central bank cut banks’ reserve requirements and credit growth...
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Gavekal Research
Long Chen
Apr 22nd 2014
5C China: Regional Growth Gets Uglier, But More Accurate
In China, the whole is not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts; in fact it can be less. China’s provincial GDP figures are viewed skeptically because of two obvious problems: the sum of provincial GDP is often much higher than national GDP, and most provinces report GDP growth faster than the national average. In what could be a sign of higher-quality data at the local level, both of these trends are now changing: the gap between the...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Thomas Gatley, Long Chen
Apr 22nd 2014
Defaults Are Coming: Where, When And How
In early 2014, China’s financial markets witnessed a milestone: for the first time, issuers of local, domestic-currency corporate bonds went into default. With China’s economy slowing and many debts coming due this year, these will be only the first of many defaults on corporate bonds.
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Gavekal Research
Arthur Kroeber
Apr 22nd 2014
5C Overview: How Much More Asian Deflation?
The latest news from Asia’s biggest economies is uninspiring. China’s growth grinds lower, and the renminbi has declined by 3% against the US dollar since January. Japan is suffering the anticipated effects of this month’s consumption tax hike, and Anatole has predicted that the BoJ will respond later this year with a fresh round of money-printing which could push USD/JPY well above its established level of 102 to the dollar.
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Gavekal Research
Charles Gave, François-Xavier Chauchat, Will Denyer, Andrew Batson, Joyce Poon, Udith Sikand
Apr 16th 2014
Five Corners (16 April 2014)
In the latest bi-weekly review of global economics and investment, Charles Gave explains why it still pays to run a balanced portfolio, despite the market’s rotation. Will Denyer argues that outlook for US consumption remains favorable, even though consumer cyclicals have taken a beating. François-Xavier Chauchat examines the reasons behind the euro’s persistent strength. Andrew Batson looks at Beijing’s new focus on jobs and finds the...
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Gavekal Research
Andrew Batson
Apr 16th 2014
Running The Red Queen's Race
By reporting the relatively low figure of a 7.4% rise in first-quarter gross domestic product, down from 7.7% in the previous quarter, China has confirmed that the current pace of economic expansion is now roughly as weak as it was during previous downturns in 2008 and 2012. While the headline number was better than market expectations, and growth clearly picked up a little in March from the lows of January and February, there are worrying signs...
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Gavekal Research
Arthur Kroeber, Louis Gave
Apr 15th 2014
Breaking The Bad News Cycle
Alarm bells have been ringing over China for a while, and there have been plenty of Quasimodos to sound them. With a poorly-understood “shadow financing” system that accounts for 20% of total credit, an overbuilt real estate market, deficit-ridden local governments and under-capitalized banks, China’s financial system has been looking shaky. Financial stress, along with the relative tightness of central bank policy since last May, helps explain...
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Fraser Howie
Apr 14th 2014
Breaking The Mold Of Capital Markets Reform
For more than 20 years, China has been experimenting with ways of bringing in capital from equity investors overseas. What has characterized all of its various programs, with their bewildering array of names—red chips, B shares, QFII—was extremely tight central-government control over who could participate and how large the fund flows could get. But the tie-up announced last week between the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges shows that a...
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Gavekal Research
Andrew Batson
Apr 11th 2014
5C China: A Blurry Target For Job Growth
China’s top policymakers have spent the past week preparing the public for today’s weak GDP reading—a rise of 7.4% in 1Q14—by emphasizing that as long as enough jobs are being created, it doesn’t matter if growth is a bit below the 7.5% official target. This is a laudable attempt to wean the system off its obsession with GDP numbers and get officials to focus on more relevant indicators.
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Gavekal Dragonomics
Research Team, Long Chen
Apr 09th 2014
The Rocky Road To Market Rates
The race is on. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said last month that he expects the liberalization of interest rates on bank deposits to be complete within two years—the first time such a clear timetable has been given for the final step in the deregulation of Chinese interest rates. Financial reform in China has usually been slow and gradual, so the two-year timeframe is a bold commitment.
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Gavekal Research
Tom Miller
Apr 08th 2014
In Laos, All Roads Lead To China
Two thousand years ago, in the days of the Roman Empire, it was said that “All roads lead to Rome.” Rome’s might was built on the back of metaled roads constructed by an army of 180,000 legionnaires, who pushed the expansion of the empire to its geographic limits. China’s expansion over its modern-day borders is primarily economic, not military. But as China’s massive domestic road-building program extends over its borders into Southeast and...
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Gavekal Research
Tom Miller
Apr 08th 2014
In Laos, All Roads Lead To China
Two thousand years ago, in the days of the Roman Empire, it was said that “All roads lead to Rome.” Rome’s might was built on the back of metaled roads constructed by an army of 180,000 legionnaires, who pushed the expansion of the empire to its geographic limits. China’s expansion over its modern-day borders is primarily economic, not military. But as China’s massive domestic road-building program extends over its borders into Southeast and...
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