The paper highlighted this week starts with an important point. If China doesn’t continue to grow at a high rate that’ll suck for China AND the rest of the world. We’re not that far away, so most will remember, from the period after the Global Financial Crisis when China’s bold stimulus produced the largest component […]
Formally known as the ‘2024 Article IV Consultation’ this annual exercise often reveals more about what’s on China’s planners minds than what the IMF ‘outsiders’ wish for them. The work was completed in July but the full report was only released on August 2nd and you’ll find it (137-pages) in full here. Below I’ve extracted […]
There’s an important caveat that qualifies the work highlighted today from Yufei Zhang at the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Kyoto in Japan. Viz.: “..our results can only be understood under the Chinese special institutional background, where the most important economic resources are controlled by public sectors (including governments, SOEs and state-owned […]
[Another contribution to the ‘why China never made it to an industrial revolution whilst the West did’ discussion.] Ruanzhuo Zhai from the Renmin University and Xiaoyang Luan from the HKU Business School have identified a period in China’s comparatively recent history, from the 10th to the 14th century, when a mercantilistic school of Confucianism flourished. […]
If, and it is an ‘if’, China stocks aren’t perched on a ledge before another big tumble then they’re consolidating in a bear market. If that’s the case, this would be good news. To be clear, a bear market is different from one that’s just gone down. A true bear market is when all hope […]
I’m flagging the ‘paper’ this week despite it being poorly written, un-reviewed, lacking rigor and by somebody who’s claimed affiliation (London School of Economics) I have a question mark over. Having said all that, Neha Baid in the monograph linked to below, makes such a startling, counterintuitive point about the state of relations between the […]
[At a banquet in China a while ago I was (sadly, by dint of age) placed next to the most senior manager of the company visited. This meant all eyes would be on me when it came to the toasts, of which there were likely to be many, but I don’t drink. In my best […]
If you wanted to study the effect of the introduction of automated manufacture on societal well being and happiness China would be a good place to start. No other major economy has been as enthusiastic in bringing in robots to help out as the charts below show. Shangkun Xie and Siyuan Fan of the Nankai […]
Researchers at the IMF, Diego A. Cerdeiro ; Parisa Kamali ; Siddharth Kothari and Dirk V Muir in a ‘Working Paper’ for the organization take a look at de-globalization (the euphemism used throughout is ‘de-risking’) and try to calculate what the cost would be if present trends and proposals were more vigorously progressed. In a […]
On reading the paper highlighted this week from Gerald Wu, Grace Lordan and Nikita from the London School of Economics and Political Science I was struck by some obvious shortcomings. The sample size is limited, the focus is on a small demographic, the structure of the experiment didn’t convince me it was rigorous and as […]
I especially enjoy it when I find a piece that upends an established view. In this case both my own and the majority of those likely to be reading this. We all operate on bias, presupposition, prejudice and received wisdom and it’d be tiresome to spend every day in conflict examining one’s intellectual operating architecture. […]
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Hong Kong – Its Very Best Self
In February 2016 I wrote on Hong Kong and said then I’d probably not write anything more about the place for some time. Eight-plus years is enough time to have left the subject alone, so I’m back with an update. In that 2016 note I flagged most of what has come to to pass, ex […]
Yurou Liu, of the Southwest Jiaotong University and Huaxia Chen of the Renmin University wondered if the degree of retail investor attention directed toward a company had a proportional effect on that company’s tendency to manipulate earnings? This question is particularly pertinent in China where so much of the turnover is due to retail investors […]
Miquel Noguer i Alonso and Foteini Samara Chatzianastasiou from The Artificial Intelligence in Finance Institute [Which seems to be an entity of their own creation] take us through the how, why and to what extent AI is being considered by the world’s regulatory authorities in regard to finance. The paper focuses on three main areas, […]
If, like me, you believed scientific progress was in some way intertwined with the development of open and democratic societies this paper should upend your thinking. Surely, it’s obvious, scientific progress developed in the West at the same time as the West was enjoying a Renaissance an Enlightenment or busy circumscribing the power of its […]
Six months ago today, frustrated by the nuts-cheap valuations of stocks in the Hong Kong market, I wrote a note on the subject (please, revisit it here Acres of Diamonds). The main point was that value often presents itself very simply. There’s rarely a need to scour the world’s obscure market segments or rummage about […]
Tao Ren, at the School of Public Affairs of the Zhejiang University, presents an analysis of how Xinjiang has moved from ‘barbaric frontier’ in the 1700s to the ‘inalienable territory of China’ it’s regarded as today. The shift has a complex history but the discovery of significant mineral resources and territorial horse trading with the […]
Professor Daniel C. K. Chow of the Ohio State University lays out in detail America’s beefs with China that’ve led to its crippling the work of the WTO. The process was initiated by the Obama administration in 2016 and completed in 2019 under the Trump regime by America refusing to appoint representatives to the Appellate […]
Investors in China’s Non State Owned Enterprises (NSOEs) have been keelhauled in recent years. Starting with scorched-earth in the for-profit-education sector the shellacking continued through the New Economy cabal and most recently portfolios exposed to the property sector have been hammered. Not unnaturally, there’s a growing sense that State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) may be a […]
Honggang Xue (et al.) from the Xi’an Jiaotong University uses the lens of ESG benefits to take on the sensitive issue of whether or not Party involvement in running companies in China is a good thing. Since 2018 Company Law in China has mandated a Party structure inside State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and many Privately […]