Author: Nial Gooding

[The work highlighted today was published in the Financial Analyst’s Journal on October 6th last year. At that time the gold price was approximately U$1,900/ounce. As I write it’s around U$1,700/ounce or 10% lower.] Gold, in real terms, peaked in 1980 and 2011 and is now not far off those levels; and after those peaks? […]

The most important point, for me at least, from the work highlighted today published in the East Asian Economic Review (Dec. ’20) by Chad P. Brown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and CEPR is how murky the global semiconductor industry is. The main point of the article though is to show how little […]

The title of the paper looked over today is misleading. It suggests a rhetorical question that an interested reader will find an answer to within it. Christian Bobmans (et al.) writing in IMF Working Paper in fact seem to have bitten off more than they can chew. The problem is with ‘energy’, just like other […]

Hannes Schwandt and Till von Wachter of the Northwestern University and University of California respectively have written a 1,500 word summary of the current academic understanding of some of the negative effects on those entering the labor market in difficult times. In the latest edition of the IMF’s Finance and Development bulletin they highlight data […]

There’s no evidence to support the notion the Chinese government either tried to suppress criticism or pumped-up positive postings on social media in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. That at least is the conclusion from an analysis of 5-million Sina Weibo posts from December 1st 2019 to February 27th 2020 conducted […]

The 163-page report highlighted today from the World Economic Forum was published last October when the pandemic was in full swing so it probably requires no updating. If anything some of the trends may have intensified? It covers 15-industries and sectors and provides (after P.49) in-depth analysis on trends in 26-advanced and emerging countries. I’ll […]

China, first in and first out of the pandemic is a great place to study not only the effects but also the after-effects on unemployment. Panle Jia Barwick of Cornell University (et. al.) gained access to China Mobile’s records of 71-milliion individuals in Guangdong province for a two year period including location and tracking specifics […]

Beneath the widely reported headline of a cut to their 2021 China-GDP growth projection from 8.2%, made last October, to now 7.9% there was a lot of more useful data in this release from the IMF on January 8th. Below are some other observations and my selection of some of the more informative charts from […]

The paper highlighted today is a useful run through of what China just did to Australia in terms of upending trade in certain vulnerable products. Vulnerable because in all cases they’re homogeneous and substitute-able. In the past Australia sold mostly iron ore and coal to China and in those cases the products were/are of high […]

China’s stock markets, where institutional investors don’t dominate shareholder registers, make a good place to study how their participation changes the behavior of listed companies. In the U.S. studies have had a harder time pinning down the effect as so much of the market is already dominated by institutions. In China though their presence is […]

Today’s paper is a mood-booster. Well, it boosted mine at least. We all know corruption is bad. The reason there’ve been so many studies into it and the behavior so well documented is there’s, sadly, so much of it. Researchers from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and the Zhongnan University of Economics and […]

Still wondering why Ant was so abruptly pulled? The paper highlighted today provides essential-reading on what may have been a major component of the regulatory authorities’ thinking. Zhengyang Bao and Difang Huang, both from Australia’s Monash University have produced the first paper, probably anywhere in the world*, that looks at how the exogenous shock of […]

If you’re not a stock analyst, or a manager of such, there’s not much here for you today. If you’re either of the above though the paper highlighted adds usefully to the debate about whether or not company visits are worth the effort. To recap; there are two schools of thought on this. Some argue […]

Cryptocurrencies get all the headlines but the real interest of late, which COVID-19 appears to have intensified, is with Central Bank Digital Currencies or CBDCs. In the ‘Working Paper’ highlighted today Raphael Auer (Et al.) of the Bank for International Settlements surveys the current development landscape and (sort-of, seems-to) concludes nobody is ready, yet, to […]

From other studies we know that rising and high home prices lead to related social problems, in China and elsewhere. Here’s a brief list: higher savings ratios, lower household consumption, reduced female labor force participation, higher marriage ages, increased inter-generational cohabitation, reduced innovation at the firm level and a crowding-out of fixed capital investment. So […]

To find the world’s cheapest market relative to it’s long-term average look below for the biggest distance between the green dot (the September valuation) and the red square (the long-term average). The cheapest market, according to this analysis, is therefore Japan. In terms of absolute cheapness the UK (at the time of this analysis) held […]

That Chinese parents want ‘Dragon’ babies i.e. children to be born if possible in the zodiacal year associated with the Dragon, is an observable fact. Marriages rise in the two years prior to a Dragon year and births increase in these years (this effect is also in evidence elsewhere in Asia). Writing in a Discussion […]

Let’s get straight to it. The effects of COVID-19 on the world’s major economies will be significant and long lasting. That’s according to Alexander Chudik of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (et. al.) writing in a CESifo (a Munich based organization) Working Paper. Below is the key figure from their work and the straight […]