The blog got 54.8m results from Google when it entered the phrase “China GDP” this week. The only problem, seemingly unrecognised by most analysts, is that China’s GDP report is a completely fictitious number, invented by the leadership each quarter to suit its own narrative. This sounds a bold statement, but it isn’t: China is the only country to […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Winners and losers from the end of China’s property bubble
As promised yesterday, the blog looks today at the potential Winners and Losers from President Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’. It is a complete break from the policies of the previous leadership, which ended up being based on a ‘wealth effect’ created by an unsustainable property bubble. Xi’s programme is emphatically about the longer term. There […]
President Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’
A new type of leader seem to be starting to emerge in China and India. President Xi Jinping in China, and premier Narendra Modi in India, are not spending much time studying the output of focus groups or investment bank analysts. Nor do they have ‘spin-doctors’ worrying about every phrase on the 24-hour news channels. Instead, they […]
Interesting Quotes (7)
Every now and then, somebody in a senior position says something that really deserves to be noticed. Often this is when they are in a state of Denial. This was the case in the blog’s first post in the Interesting Quotes series, when CitiGroup CEO, Chuck Prince dismissed worries about subprime losses in August 2007, saying: […]
China’s electricity consumption shows growth at 4.5% and slowing
There’s a lot of wishful thinking underway about China’s future growth. All the experts who told us that its growth was ‘inevitable’ and would never end, are now having to face the issue that clearly growth is now slowing fast. Their response, of course, is to remain in Denial mode. They imagine that a magic […]
China’s lending problems begin to worry wider world – too late
Suddenly, people are starting to talk about China and the risks it creates for the global economy. There is a lifecycle to the way that such issues develop in the general consciousness, as John Mauldin has observed. And so this development suggests that we are now well along the process, as highlighted in the chart above: […]
China’s lending bubble could now lead to zero GDP growth
China has been primarily responsible for driving global growth since the Crisis began in 2008. Auto sales, for example, would have seen negative growth world-wide without China. And auto manufacturing is the world’s largest manufacturing industry. The chemical industry has been in a similar position. Whilst China is also now responsible for nearly 50% of global […]
From Jiang to Hu and the lost decade
President Jiang Zemin inherited a difficult economic and political situation when taking power in 1993, as did Deng in 1977 and current president Xi last year. Jiang had to set in motion China’s second economic cycle of the post-Mao era, or risk seeing the country fall back into poverty and the political turmoil of another Cultural Revolution. Similarly today, […]
China focuses on the need for jobs, as Western companies reshore production
Its all about jobs. That’s the clear message from this month’s critical Economic Plenum in China, confirming the blog’s analysis back in February 2012. Of course, there was a lot of detail about future reform plans, which will certainly help to move the country’s economy in the right direction. But in the short-term, the key […]
China’s new leadership heads in a new direction
As promised, the blog today looks at the impact of former President Jiang Zemin’s return to active politics during the recent leadership transition. Its monitoring of expert commentary inside and outside China suggests he has achieved 4 major changes: • Corruption. Countries cannot progress if corruption dominates daily life. Thus it seems critically important that […]