Skyscraper Height and the Business Cycle It seems obvious there should be some relationship between the health of an economy and the willingness and ability of developers to create ever taller buildings. Moreover, since tall buildings are often not economically sound propositions a large part of the decision to construct them must rest on hubris […]
Category: Sunday Papers
I’m part way through a disturbing new book that’s causing fresh chatter in the China nerdosphere and beyond [I’ve also seen a number of favorable reviews, the latest in the Weekend FT]. The book is ‘The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy’ by Mr. Daniel A. Bell, Chair Professor of the Schwarzman […]
From Fast to Smart Growth The link above will take you to a fact-packed 64-pager from JLL that dives deeply into the current state of affairs in and prospects for the major property investment sectors in China. They turn over each of the retail, logistics, office and hotel markets and, notwithstanding their obviously partisan position, […]
Measuring the Quality of Management The link above will take you to one of the most powerful pieces I’ve seen in a while. Powerful because the idea is so simple. Why not analyze corporate communications and rank companies based on how much candor they display? That’s exactly what the author, Mr. L. J. Rittenhouse, CEO […]
Can China innovate? I have no doubt; but that’s not a widely held view by many in the West. Not a paper today but an interesting interview with Yiwu He, PhD, MBA, Senior Program Officer for Discovery and Translational Sciences at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where he oversees the Biomarker Program and manages […]
Prejudice is sooo comforting. It removes the need for hard thinking, something I observe most of the world’s population seem to rarely engage in, and also it makes life easier if you just know you’re right about so much. Am I right, or am I right? Right? For investors though (and I’m as guilty as […]
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The Sunday Paper – My Ukraine
A rest from China this week, although I spent last week in Chengdu and Chongqing and will post a summary of the trip together with some new thinking in the next few days. Today, instead, something on the Ukraine. My interest in this was piqued by the decision of many world leaders to stay away […]
XBRL, if you’re not fully up to speed, stands for Extensible Business Reporting Language. It’s a global standard for financial reporting which can be machine read and China was the first jurisdiction that made it mandatory in 2009. The paper I’m highlighting this week is from Songsheng Chan, Ling Harris, Wenyang Li and Donglin Wu […]
That China needs to make progress up the technology/innovation curve is obvious; not least to the Zhongnanhai based engineers of ‘New Normal’. How far behind the leading edge though are they presently I wondered? And how will we be able to measure the degree and rate of catchup in years to come? While investigating this […]
Is there anything more thrilling than finding out something you took for granted is wrong? I started this paper with a heavy heart because I knew what it would conclude. I’ve read academic literature before on the subject and the conclusion is always the intuitive one that China’s underdeveloped financial system retards economic growth. Dozy […]
One belt, one road. Who wouldn’t want that? Er, right, but what is it? Exactly? This weeks paper is more a long snippet but distills elegantly the big thinking behind four words that may end up changing China’s place in the world order more profoundly than since Deng opened the door in 1978. Ms. Nadege […]
http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2015/03/16-xi-jinping-inner-circle-mishu-cluster-li The link above will take you to a summary of the paper I want to highlight this week and also links to the first three papers in this series from Mr. Cheng Li of the Brookings Institute (roll back in my Sunday Papers section and you’ll find my earlier summaries). In this paper the […]
A break from China this week and a detailed look at how ISIL funds itself from the Financial Action Task Force in a report from February. I thought I’d just skim this document and cherry-pick points on how to avoid being involved with terrorist financing. I discovered it instead to be a page-turner. Extensive details of […]
[I found a full length version, with English subtitles, of Chai Jing’s (柴静) ‘Under The Dome'(穹顶之下) here at http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/under-the-dome-watch-the-viral-video-documentary-about-pollution-that-is-scaring-the-chinese-government-20150308-13yag6.html. Released on February 28th it got 150m hits on Tencent in the first three days before being pulled on March 2nd; strong stuff. Now read on.] Life expectancy increases with economic growth; and this has been reliably […]
Largely due to it’s communist DNA the Chinese government has never ‘sold’ land to anyone. Concerns about a backlash against disposing of communal property to individuals led them in the 1980’s down the fudge-tastic path of granting limited use leases. For residential property these were/are for 70-years, for industrial property they’re for 50-years and for […]
The last two Sunday papers jabbed obliquely at the perils of ETF investing with one highlighting the dangers of following an index and the other on why ETFs lead smart people to dumb decisions. This one though goes straight for the gut. The authors, Mr. Si Cheng, Mr. Massimo Massa and Mr. Hong Zhang of […]
Feeling good about the market? Wanna get some money to work on Monday because the German data last week suggests the Eurozone might be in better shape than previously thought? Whatever you ‘feel’ about markets and, more importantly, the feeling you can somehow time your purchases and sales for optimum effect is almost certainly wrong. […]
The next financial crisis (only the dead have seen the end of these) will have something to do with Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) with leverage, as it always is, no doubt the accelerant. I say this because crises in the past have usually come from something that starts out as a good idea but then […]
Me? I believe Quantitative Easing (QE) is at worst a placebo; and the record on the efficacy of placebos is impressive enough to make even their prescription worthwhile in many cases. What I’m highlighting this week is not an academic paper but a telling report from the European Central Bank (ECB) that may go some […]
Does China have a corruption problem? In the paper I’m highlighting this week, from Mr. Carlos D. Ramirez of the Department of Economics at the George Mason University, the conclusion is; er, not really. What’s especially interesting about this work is that was published in December 2012 some time before Mr. Xi went in determined […]