Since China was granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations status by the U.S. in 2000, conditional on its accession to the WTO the following year, study after study has been produced to show how badly that’s worked out for U.S. workers in manufacturing industries. Few studies have looked though at the effect on China’s labor force; […]
Author: Nial Gooding
There’s an abundance of work on U.S. companies that shows, on balance, less-experienced (hereafter ‘Rookie’) directors have a positive influence on a firm’s performance. In China though firms are different in that in nearly all cases there’s a majority owner and here the ‘.. main governance issue [in China] is controlling shareholder wealth expropriation from […]
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And The Loser Is?
The world’s worst performing major stock market in 2019, barring any big upset in the next couple of days, will have been Hong Kong. As of last Friday here are the world’s largest market performances for 2019 [Indices exclude dividends in all cases]: #1 S+P-500 +29% #2 Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite +21% #3 Nikkei-225 + […]
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Hong Kong’s 2019 IPOs: Fool’s Paradise
I’ve written before about how Hong Kong IPOs (and China stocks in general) consistently disappoint investors so I don’t want to revisit, at length, that theme here. [Shovel Vendors versus Prospectors Oct. 2018, Doggy China Stocks Dec. 2018] Instead, before the press write the inevitable gush about how 2019 has been a record year for […]
‘Pants-On-Fire!’ China bashers have been quiet of late. Dire predictions about the property market have failed to materialize and breathless commentary about rising debt levels has stopped because, well, debt levels (in relative terms) have sort of stopped rising. A few doughty muckrakers though have been trying to make a case that household debt is […]
Holy smoke! Every investor, institutional or PA-punter should print out the extract below from the paper highlighted today. The former should pin it up in a prominent location in their office; the latter might want to put it on their refrigerator door. What you’re looking at (at the top) is how well stocks do after […]
The IMF were in Hong Kong recently and a summary of their conclusions and recommendations was released last Wednesday, December 4th. You can read that in full here HKSAR IMF Health Check December 2019; but if you don’t have time here’s a very brief summary. Spend! Spend!! Spend!!! The team note a recent fiscal stimulus […]
Financial professionals know the idea that an individual can ‘day-trade’ for a living is a dangerous conceit. However, literature produced by brokerages and other service providers who offer to teach investors this ‘skill’ suggests that rubes are continuously persuaded this is possible. In a study of the world’s third largest equity futures contract on the […]
What makes the International Finance Discussion Paper highlighted today from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System so useful is not just its scholarly conclusions, but also its commonsense observation that in reality their work may provide only conservative estimates of the magnitude of a global shock resulting from a China hard landing. […]
What’s wrong with the following statement? The Chinese save too much; and this leads to a large current account surplus that’s destabilizing for both them and the world. It may have been correct ten or even five years ago; but IT’S NOT NOW. Let’s first have a look at that over-saving notion. The chart here […]
Why have Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) stayed so big and, in many cases, gotten bigger in recent years? Work from Jim Huangnan Shen from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (et. al.) clarifies some notions that were, until this work, mostly anecdotal. From around 1998 the Chinese government initiated a […]
Human beings have inherited ticks from their ancestors that were handy when roaming the plains of the Serengeti but are now dangerous if not commonsensically moderated. Two notable examples are dietary preference and risk taking. Our ancestors gained a reproductive advantage from gorging when they could, especially if what was on offer was either sweet […]
You’re a government that wants to encourage output (and what government doesn’t?). There are two way you can do this; stimulate investment or innovation. In 2004 China decided it wanted to encourage the latter and chose six metal-bashing industries in the notoriously metal-bashing-centric provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning as experiments for a pilot reform […]
A short paper from Ruwei Zhao at the School of Business at the Jiangnan University in Wuxi has a very clear message that requires no real elaboration. So here it is: There is a clear correlation between an uptick of interest in TMC a year ahead of a stock price collapse; but there is no […]
You’ve heard by now there’s a United Nations report that documents upwards of 1m Uighurs held in captivity in ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang? There is, in fact, no such report. There’s no smoke without fire though and the story is rooted in an event that took place on August 10th last year. China is a […]
Hongchang Li, appropriately from the Beijing Jiaotong (交通, traffic) University (et. al.), wanted the answer to a simple question; is money spent in China on transportation infrastructure money well spent? For the purposes of the research ‘well spent’ was defined as investment that led to a rise in local GDP i.e. what ‘bang’ is being […]
Writing in the Journal of Foreign Affairs Weijian Shan, Chairman and CEO of HK based PE firm PAG and author of the recent book ‘Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America’ concludes America will be the loser from the trade war if it’s protracted. The main point he makes is the trade […]
Nobody really knows why China’s domestic A-shares trade at a premium, and have now for a very long time, to exactly the same shares listed in Hong Kong in H-share form. [A coffee, at your expense of course, and you can have my not very informed two-pennyworth at your leisure] Taking the approach, (sort of) […]
In the smallest of nutshells, here’s the picture (below) that sums up the 258-page report released by the ADB Wednesday last week, an update to work published earlier in the year. The elephant in the room is of course the trade dispute between America and China. Trade between the two countries is now conspicuously affected […]
Here’s the main problem with 5G (the chart below). The people who (currently, but that could change) are being asked to build the network may baulk at a potential repeat of what happened the last time they spent billions building the present network architecture. The paper highlighted today covers a lot of ground in a […]