Black Swans anyone? The paper highlighted this week is dense; but there’s a part I have to abstract in full because its highly topical and I can’t summarize it easily. Alibaba fans please take time to digest independent research analyst Mr. Michael C.I. Nwogugu’s thoughts here: “..Alibaba poses a substantial financial stability risk due to […]
Author: Nial Gooding
Writing in the Journal of International Banking Law and Regulation Lerong Lu and Lu Longjie, both from the University of Leeds, provide the clearest account I’ve seen to date about how regulators in China lost control of margin finance in 2014 which led to the spectacular bull and bust market that followed in Chinese A-shares. […]
Using data from one of China’s largest P2P operations, Renrendai (Renrendai 人人贷), the authors of the paper highlighted this week, Fabio Braggion, Alberto Manconi and Haikun Zhu from the universities of Tilburg in the Netherlands and Bocconi in Milan, set out to provide an answer to the question in the title. What they needed for […]
I’ve summarized and posted links to a number of papers in the past year or so on atmospheric pollution in China. The paper highlighted and linked to this week will be the last in this series. Today’s paper from Shihe Fu, V. Brian Viard and Peng Zhang of the Southwestern University, the Cheung Kong Graduate […]
What happens if you take a strategy that’s (sort of) reliably worked in the U.S. over a long period and see if it can be applied to the A-share markets in China? That’s what Jason C. Hsu, Vivek Viswanathan, Chenhui Wang and Philip Wool with the University of California’s Anderson School of Business and Rayliant […]
Get your brand name type right, at least in autos in China, and you can expect a 7.6% sales advantage. Get it wrong and your sales could under-perform by as much as nearly 5%; so what is ‘right’ and/or ‘wrong’? The authors of the paper highlighted this week, Fang Wu, Qi Sun, Rajdeep Grewal and […]
Atmospheric pollution in China is bad. Nobody would pretend otherwise; but why, exactly, does it need to be cleaned up? Most studies on the problem have focused on narrow health dis-benefits such as respiratory and related issues leading to disability and premature death. So far so nasty. In the paper highlighted today though Xi Chen […]
Academics [Er, shouldn’t that be ‘kids’? Ed.] say the funniest things. Sometimes when you look at some work from academia, as with the paper today, as a practitioner you know the answer to a headline question right away. The proofs are just a formality. Hopefully, anyone else also engaged at the sharp end of things […]
Sometimes just a picture (or two in this case) can sum up an argument. Here you see the relationship between investment and growth for 60-major economies, 30-developing and 30-developed from 1975 to 2014. Next, the relationship between consumption, as a percentage of GDP, and growth. No Holmesian deduction required to see there’s a […]
Forget debt, the next big issues that will dominate discussion about China’s future progress will be on how to fix the problem of income inequality and whether or not China can escape the middle-income-trap. The paper highlighted this week looks at the first issue and rather than suggest a fix aims merely to quantify the […]
If you wanted to foster a ‘quality’ stock market you’d pick only the best companies to list right? In China’s case this would mean the biggest, most profitable and best-connected politically. Researchers Weishi Jia and Grace Pownall from the Emory University in Atlanta and Jingran Zhao from the HK Polytechnic set out to see if […]
Preamble Facts, in plain sight, convinced me in September 2014 that China was heading for a hard landing; and, thereafter plus or minus, that’s pretty much what we got. [You can find that piece here Hard Landing]. China’s slowdown has been part product of a difficult global environment and part product of a policy to jump […]
Doctor Stuart Malawer, from the George Mason University is an academic; but the paper highlighted this week from him reads more like an op-ed and is clearly partisan. However, within the doctor’s passionate warning about how messy the reality of President Trump following up on trade related promises is going to be he makes some […]
China is only one of four countries that require (some but not all) companies to produce CSR reports. The others, Denmark, Malaysia and South Africa are minnows by comparison. In 2012 China heaved aloft 8.1bn tons of greenhouse gasses, over 50% more than it’s closest rival in the pollution game the U.S. It’s estimated that […]
Margaret Thatcher started the process; and, since her first government began the wholesale sell-down of state owned assets, the rest of the world has enthusiastically followed suit. In nearly all cases liberated state owned companies, and their stock prices, do either well or very well following privatization. China’s experience though has been different. China’s SOE […]
The dryness of the title of the paper highlighted this week almost caused me to overlook it; and that would have been a mistake. It’s a bombshell. It’s conclusion is a vindication of my current decision to avoid A-shares and a huge wake-up call to the increasingly large number of institutional investors now trying their […]
I plan to visit Shenyang, the capital of China’s rust-belt Liaoning province, in May. I’m going because I want to get a first-hand sense of how the switch from the production to the consumption economic model is affecting the losers. Liaoning, one of the only areas in China (partly due to a now exposed inflated […]
“..there is no evidence of over-investment in infrastructure at the aggregate level. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the marginal return to infrastructure investment in the PRC has been rapidly declining.” This is according to Zhigang Li writing in an Asian Development Bank Institute Working Paper from January this year. Believe it or not there’s […]
Preamble With the exception of a puff in 2014~15, mostly and quickly reversed, China’s stock markets have been dull places since the GFC. For a full-throated roaring bull market to ever reestablish itself investors, both domestic and foreign, are going to have to buy bank stocks as these dominate major indices. Without such a move […]
‘..a new era of transparency is emerging.’ [With regard to listed companies on China’s domestic A-share markets]. That’s according to Jing Chen, Elizabeth Dedman, Muhammad Yahya Ghazali and Ja Ryong Kim, all from the University of Notingham in the U.K. writing in the paper highlighted this week. The researchers set out to see if the […]