Why Can’t We Be Friends? The link above will take you to a paper from the National Bureau of Asian Research (Seattle, Washington) written by Mr. James P. Nolan, a US Air Force officer assigned to U.S. Pacific Air Forces (who recently completed an MA at Georgetown University). It’s a depressing read as it highlights, […]
China’s stock markets have been noisy places of late. Take a step back though and nothing that remarkable, in the context of what markets are regularly observed to do elsewhere, has taken place. I believe schadenfreude on the part of the doubters, the majority of international investors, accounts for much of the amplification of what […]
Stature, Obesity, and Portfolio Choice The link above will take you to a paper by George Korniotis and Alok Kumar, from the University of Miami, where they extend work on how physical appearance affects how many of us live our lives. John Adams (1.7m) joked that George Washington (1.88m) was sure to become the first […]
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 […]
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, […]
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China Stocks – Is That It?
Preamble I wrote earlier in the year I didn’t believe China stocks had entered a bull-market; and that’s still my view. To be clear what I meant then, and now, is China stocks have yet to capture the interest of a sufficiently broad group of investors to allow for the kind of self-sustaining momentum that […]
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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China Property – Postcard from The Edge
[I was in Chengdu and Chongqing last week looking at property with Ms. Nicolle Wong of CLSA and her China property team as my guide.] A look at a regular map of China makes you wonder why Chengdu and Chongqing are described as being in the West? To the casual observer they look sort of […]
[I’ve just spent the last week as a guest of CLSA at their China Forum. First in Chengdu then on the road in Chengdu and Chongqing specifically taking the pulse of the local property market. Especial thanks to Ms.Nicolle Wong and her team for the property leg.] No other place on earth has so many […]
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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 […]
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Value Investors Do It With Numbers
Preamble A few years ago there was a craze for ‘do-it-with’ jokes. Only the very naive would have failed to recognize do-it as a none too subtle euphemism for, well, doing it. This produced some quite amusing one liners. Organization theorists do it loosely coupled, for example; and some really sad ones. Monte Carloists do […]
The reality of events in China in the first quarter was that not much happened. The results season was a ‘meh’, underlying trends in the broad economy remained mixed and the anti-corruption campaign continued to affect decision making contributing to the new normal pace (slower) of economic development. So what’s with these fizzy stock markets? […]
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 […]