The reform legacy - Part II

Since the last post there have been a couple of articles which highlight quite well the importance of the reform debate and the main themes.  As the PBOC launched further stimulus (including via a new tool called "Pledged Supplementary Lending" involving 1 trillion yuan for new lending), James MacKintosh, Investment Editor of the Financial Times filmed an interesting presentation giving some context to the resulting rise in share prices. While ordinarily share prices would be indicative of higher confidence and expectations for growth, MacKintosh noted that the sectors which had shown the greatest share price increases (and saw the best response to stimulus measures) were companies in the banking, property and industrial sectors - all sectors which the Chinese authorities wanted to steer investment away from (and into other sectors) as part of the reform and rebalancing process.  Or as James put it:

 "a return to pre-crisis business as usual...a pause in reform means less risk in property and banking as well as the old line state-owned enterprises".

"China Property Gamble" (c) Financial Times

Of course what James didn't dwell on (but certainly implied) is that there would be more risk overall and in the medium to long term (hence the need for reform to reduce the risk, sadly not carried through).  Over at FTAlphaville, the suppression of risk was covered well in an article by David Keohane who noted falling bond yields, the bailing out of one trust which had been set to default and a pessimistic analysis from reputed analyst Diana Choyleva of Lombard Street Research who noted:

 ...But the more sinister explanation [of failure of domestic demand to drive economic growth] is that the authorities are unable to provide a significant boost to growth even if they want to. They may be trying to boost credit to SMEs, but demand for loans has come off again. China needs to clean up after its debt binge, not stoke it further. The current level of debt may just about mean that Beijing has a chance to reform successfully even if that will involve a few years of meagre growth and financial distress. But the ongoing rapid rate of increase in debt suggests that policymakers do not have too long to postpone much-needed defaults...

Zerohedge meanwhile has taken a much more vigorous editorial line and especially with the Qingdao commodity financing scandal (including discussion of a note from Goldman Sachs as to the impact from an unwinding of metal-based rehypothecation).  On the new stimulus measures and their indication of the slowdown in reforms, contributorTyler Durden is blunt:
 

So whatever way you look at it, the PBOC thinks China needs more credit (through one channel or another) to keep the ponzi alive. Anyone still harboring any belief in reform, rotation to consumerism is sadly mistaken. One day of illiquidity appears to have been enough to prove that they need to keep the pipes wide open. The question is where that hot money flows as they clamp down (or not) on external funding channels.

And also:

Simply put - you can kiss goodbye any hopes of China ceasing its exuberant credit creation... (especially now that the CCFD ponzi scheme has been exposed via Qingdao -and drastically reduced that channel). Reforms are all talk and the bubble will just grow bigger with fewer and fewer attractive outlets for that hot money (now that the US real estate transmission channel has been identified and likely closed)... cue real inflation.

From those Zerohedge articles are two charts of note, the first showing the total amount of credit (bank assets) in the Chinese economy and its rapid growth:

and the second the rise in rates which preceded the recent PBOC stimulus (after it apparently stopped conducting repo operations), which corresponds nicely with the increase in share prices mentioned before (imagine the effect on share prices if repo rates continue to rise and there is no new liquidity from the PBOC?!):

 

Finally, while it will still remain for the next post to discuss some summer reading about the history of reform in China, it can be added one extra piece of reading on exactly this point - a 2013 IMF Working Paper:  "China’s Path to Consumer-Based Growth: Reorienting Investment and Enhancing Efficiency" (here), which " proposes a possible framework for identifying excessive investment".

The reform legacy - Part I

One of the most significant debates of the moment is the extent to which China is engaging in reform away from the production-heavy, subsidised, export-orientated economy towards a more balanced, consumption-led, open and lower growth (but more sustainable) model.

This is the background amidst which debates such as regarding China's target rate of GDP growth and the internationalisation of the currency (the Renminbi) have occurred and there are plenty of opinions on offer.  A good example was seen at the conference organised by the Financial Times' offshoot FTAlphaville, where celebrity guests Michael Pettis and Carson Block offered differing visions - in a short interview Pettis noted that rebalancing was proceeding in a more or less predictable manner (with reforms proceeding as announced in the Third Plenum), while for Carson Block, an impending debt crisis would likely arrive sooner and cause enough trouble as to hinder any meaningful schedule of reform. 

As it happens Pettis has considered the issue of debt quite specifically and a recent post on his blog argues its importance in understanding China's growth prospects and in understanding rebalancing - a feature of one of his recent books.  A recording of Pettis speaking at the 2013 Wine Country Conference sets out the background in excellent detail and is a real eye opener - Pettis likens the Chinese economic model to that of Japan "on steroids".  There is an interesting contrast with Pettis' blog post - which concludes asking the question of where the great losses from the excessive debt will be recognised.  In the Wine Country presentation Pettis details how losses in Japan were absorbed by the government when it took on the debts of the banking system rather than overseeing writeoffs (in a manner similar to which European sovereigns today are taking on the risk of their bloated banking sectors).  It would seem likely that the same may occur in China, where corporate debt now has surpassed that of the US and is estimated to be 200% of GDP.

Leaning to the chaotic
As Pettis notes in his presentation and elsewhere rebalancing is inevitable from a macroeconomic point of view and amidst the choices available to economic decision-makers are a range of outcomes from orderly rebalancing to chaotic.  Recent news has suggested that (i) authorities in China are trying to delay rebalancing, through measures like the "mini-stimulus" (which will only worsen the outcome later on) and (ii) events on the ground may be starting to overwhelm the ability of the authorities to maintain control such that rebalancing will not be orderly.

The mini-stimulus was unveiled in April 2014 with announcements of new spending targeting SOEs and state-focussed industries, with results appearing to show increased production by mid June and into July.  So far as expected.  But in addition to wondering where the next round of growth is going to come from since the administration's mini-stimulus has delayed SOE reform and shifting of production to the private sector, several themes have emerged in the background which could undermine the whole process.  These are:

1.  The divergence between Government and Private Economics surveys
As this article on Zerohedge notes, essentially one of the teams producing the surveys is likely just making up the numbers since private surveys show economic stagnation while government produced statistics paint a rosy picture.

One set of statistics is likely to be false and if it is the government produced statistics then the state of the Chinese economy could be grave.

2.  The property market is imploding
Daily updates on the Investing in Chinese Stocks Blog are offering a disturbing picture of financial collapse across the country with nationwide price falls in properties for sale in cities across the country, developers launching all manner of tactics to clear sales targets and credit guarantee and other private financing firms seeing their directors flee owing creditors millions.  This is getting litte attention in the Western media although an article in Zerohedge (drawing from a Bloomberg article) provides a useful summary.

3.  The commodities finance trade has frozen up
Sophisticated China watchers will be aware of the holes in the great capital wall which have allowed capital to circulate through the Chinese economy and keep it functioning, including the remittance program which allowed wealthy Chinese to evade the limit on remittances and engage in massive capital flight by transferring funds out of China to buy real estate in developed markets like Canada, Australia and the US.  One method of effecting remittances was through a hidden program at certain banks which was the subject of an expose by CCTV, the State broadcaster.  Commentators noted that the expose may have been part of a factional battle taking place between factions aligned with CCTV and the PBOC (since the programs were approved), but of even more significance is the emergence of fraud in the commodities trade.

Also arising as part of a corruption investigation, charges of fraud at the large port of Qingdao by Decheng Mining, a metals trader which offered financing and rehypothecated metal stocks (using the same collateral for multiple loans, including using forged documents) is of note not only because of the size of fraud or that international banks have been involved, but that the whole commodity financing industry in China is under threat and that as such a significant amount of liquidity for the Chinese financial sector which the commodity financing provides could be at risk.  An interesting article refers to a recent failure of a letter of credit settlement - which does remind of failures of repo trades which presaged the Lehman collapse - which can only be understood as systemic.

The next blog will look at some interesting summer reading which traces the historic background that helped lead to the current situation, but until then here is a shot from a new Chinese water park which speaks to more than just the plight of the swimmers...

 

The psychology of grand gestures

These days many people approach China through the lens of superlatives - massive buildings and infrastructure, dynamic fast paced growth and grand government visions.  Local press Caixin had a photo series of some of the more opulent government offices which had been built in recent years in some of the more deserted parts of China.  This correspondent can recall travelling to Shanghai in the late 1990s and being impressed by the opulence of the central square and museum and the comparative poverty of the shopping mall below - which no doubt has long since been renovated.  Perhaps, as suggested by the Independent newspaper it is easy to misinterpret what is going on in China simply by being an outsider.  Nevertheless there does seem to be some insight from reviewing what will be termed the "grand gestures" being made by the Chinese in administration (and their possible view of events through this perspective).

To start with the US however, many have argued that the Chinese administration places great weight in its actions by what is happening in the US and arguably much of China's recent policy is seen to have been calibrated with big shifts in US policy.  Hence many analysts point to the US-led financial crisis in 2008 as having caused a pivot in Chinese fiscal policy - when the administration not only decided to embark on the massive stimulus in 2009 and 2010 which saw more money lent out by the state-directed banking system than delivered by the US administration in the TARP (troubled asset relief program) which preceded the recapitalisation of the US banking system.  More particularly, those analysts note that in addition to the decision that was made at the time, it was also a time in which the top of China's government interpreted that the US economic model itself was defunct - that no serious government would let its banking system collapse and that China was wasting its time trying to emulate the US (as it had been doing for many years since its own banks had been cleaned up in the 2000s).

Of course, such an interpretation fundamentally misunderstands capitalism, and it has been noted that in seeking to construct a capitalist economy China still hasn't taken to heart the idea that businesses need to fail (such that, although pain in the solar industry, one of the worst performers is being delayed, at some point the domestic debt market will have its first default and certain poorly performing big enterprises will go bankrupt).  Nevertheless until a day of reckoning, the Chinese are doubling down on their existing policies and no doubt continuing the status quo (or trying to).  

Free China love zone
And hence the suggestion that China is drawing the same conclusions as to US decline.  As the US government went into lockdown with the impasse over the debt ceiling, reports of frustrated Chinese tourists in Washington corresponded with the response in China itself - decrying the "ugly side of partisan politics" (here). And, as per the headline, the Chinese presidential administration was responding with one grand gesture - Chinese president Xi Jinping undertaking a charm offensive to South East Asia (as Obama's trip was cancelled).  The linked article didn't touch on the delicate nature of China's relations with South East Asia following disputes in the South East China Sea, which no doubt complicate the picture.

Likewise on the economic front, China's opening of a free trade zone in Shanghai (immediately offering customs and warehousing facilities but with the suggestion of financial reform) was launched with uncertainty as regulations were still being drawn up, while many commentators, including the Economist concluded the measures were likely to disappoint (and a damp squib in fact).  For this author the significance of the recent zone opening is more in the gesture than the outcome - many other cities around China are seeking to open free trade zones which may do brisker trade than Shanghai (including Dongjiang which is seeking to become a major aviation leasing and offshore centre) and more significantly the step is being promoted as a new track of reform mirroring the opening of the Special Economic Zones in the 1980s.

The success of the zones will remain to be seen but it is unclear whether they constitute the reforms China needs.  As a gesture though, the announcement of the Shanghai zone has had an impact and that may be enough to keep positive news going for now.  On the other hand the gesture seemed to highlight current problems rather than hide them - property prices in Shanghai around the proposed zone have risen dramatically on the opening even as the included activities were not announced and there was no indication it will be successful.

If the real problems - property boom and collapse and strain in the banking sector do flare up then as a guide we must expect significant actions such as the credit squeeze of June 2013 - of which there will undoubtedly be more significant gestures to reassure confidence as real measures.  

Crunch time!

Very contrasting news and images coming out of China at the moment.  While Wen Jiabao was singing his final swansong at the Party Congress this week amidst the formal handover of power, property owners were fleeing to government offices to process property sales before the hastily announced 20% capital gains tax commences.  It is intended to slow down rising property prices.  It may have burst the bubble instead.

Express filing, Shanghai style

He did it his way
Wen's China was on display for all American's midweek when longtime China Watcher Gillem Tulloch, of ForensicAsia (with the assistance of others behind the scenes like Patrick Chovanec), took CBS' 60 minutes team for a walk through China's ghost cities.  The empty shopping centres, half started office blocks and empty landscape is one of Wen's legacies.

Another legacy is the opening up of reporting on social issues, along with professed policies by the leadership to do something about it.  Reports have circulated of polluted "cancer villages" and the below from a Daily Mail piece captures the mood at the moment:

The Chinese government has promised to tackle 'cancer villages' - areas where pollution is so bad it has lead to a huge rise in diseases like stomach cancer - after a huge social media backlash from both ordinary Chinese people and global campaigners.There has been an explosion of outrage about cancer villages on China's social media sites and blogs, which are used by increasingly powerful activists to raise awareness.

But problems run deep.  As in the case of Dalahai, a village in Inner Mongolia profiled by Caixin magazine which has suffered from a nearby radioactive tailings dam, the villagers must drill to increasing depths to tap water which is safe to drink.  It is a moot point anyway as many villagers have fallen ill, moved away or given up hoping for promised though inadequate compensation.

Going green
The Green agenda was supposed to be one of the highlights for Wen's legacy with the push for renewables and various environmental policies which have also failed.  Instead the policy failure so evident in the Beijing smog has been upstaged by tycoon and philanthropist Chen Guangbiao, who made headlines for a number of radical stunts, including  selling cans of fresh air, recommending Chinese people eat less, and attending this week's Congress by bike, in a green suit.  While refreshing it is uncertain how likely any of his recommendations will be to advance the agenda.

The wrong type of green (c) Reuters

The dead hand of the State
One of the big obstacles to reform is the vested interests of state enterprises.  Caixin had an excellent piece on the failures at the top of State shipping company Cosco which took up the completely wrong strategy and is now hemorrhaging cash.  The FT mentioned the role that the head of M&A champion Sinopec had, in weakening regulation to restrict the sulphur content of its refineries near Beijing which have caused much of the smog.  And on the green side, Caixin has just reported details of the termination of the head of Suntech, the failed solar company which officials were saying should have been consollidated with all the other failing solar companies by now.

Most worringly in a market where risks are dire and State Owned Enterprises have lavished shareholder funds - the property sector (which is now tanking), one key sensible measure - that the SOEs withdraw from the market, has been ignored.  This and everything else does not bode well.

The audacity of hope

Bears rally
A couple of provocative headlines hit the newsfeeds this week as some notably bearish Chinese analysts digested the recent stimulus announcements.  Gordon Chang's article "China is running out of money"  certainly grabbed attention and while much of the discussion about the country's central bank, the People's Bank of China (and its ability to maintain the system of foreign exchange inflows) has been covered before, details of how short some local authorities are of money right now is rather new (and emerging).

In contrast, investors' optimism about the extent of the current stimulus is well illustrated by a slide from a recent Rio Tinto investor presentation (below).  Frequent readers will recognise one of the project leaders - the National Development Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) which Victor Shih and others have identified as being at times a very effective rubber stamp executing little scrutiny of projects it approves (including earlier in the year a project to influence the weather).

Michael Pascoe of the Sydney Morning Herald is one China bull who saw only a soft landing from the stimulus and in pro-reform comments of a Bank of China official.  Similarly doveish comments from Jiang Chaoliang, chairman of pillar bank AgBank (Agricultural Bank of China) suggested a benign situation of measured reform.  However it is questionable how much the necessary reforms and consumption increases will proceed during a stimulus given fairly little progress made on such things during the last round of stimulus in 2008-9.

Meanwhile at respected magazine Caixin, Andy Xie sought to put recent conditions into perspective, with some dire forecasts for the property and finance sectors:

China's land market will experience a dramatic adjustment ahead. In most cities, land prices may fall by 80 percent. The financial consequences will be severe. Most bank loans are backed up directly or indirectly by land. If land prices fall so much, the banking system would suffer a crippling level of bad loans. Local governments increased their spending appetite during the heyday of land sales. They will have a difficult time adjusting to the new reality. Their struggle to source new revenues will be the main reason for social instability ahead.

And adding difficulty the FT's Beyond Brics blog noted, was that the fact that many statistics releases which drive the China news cycle seem to increasingly split analyst opinion (pointing to more or less future growth in equal measure).  Similar to the debates as to whether key Chinese statistics are falsified - a recent report examined opposing interpretations of rising non-performing loans data by Reuters and Bloomberg. Reuters' conclusion, that it was a positive sign (looking at the overall ratios provided by the China Banking Regulatory Commission), was favoured.

Chinese property, it's a long way down...

Reluctant consolidations
While questions remain over the long term outcomes from the new stimulus, other commentators have noted falling profits across a number of sectors and in some cases a run of bankruptcies is looking likely.  Three industries which have been observed to be at risk of widespread bankruptcies are the solar panel makers, shipbuilders and automakers.

For manufacturers of photo-voltaic cells there have been plenty of headlines for Chinese companies, themselves struggling against a backdrop of oversupply and falling prices. Suntech, the largest solar panel maker in the world, announced it had been defrauded by an Italian co-investor (who offered fake German bonds as security for a payment guarantee) and just recently obtained a worldwide freezing order against its Italian partner's assets.  Even without this, the company is struggling under a weight of debt.  LDK Solar, based in Xinyu was bailed out by the local authority last month, although some commentators doubted whether even this would be sufficient to restore the companies' prospects.

Chinese shipbuilders meanwhile are continuing to tread water through the worst conditions in a decade.  Major builders including Rongsheng and Cosco have recently been hit by profit concerns amongst falling orders and shrinking backlogs, while there have been several bankruptcies including Dalian Oriental Precision & Engineering and a major shipbuilder in Zheijiang province.

And local car manufacturers (who have been flooding dealers with unsold inventories) face the prospect of being forced into bankruptcy by local authorities due to widespread anticipation of failures.  As this report from Ken Rapoza in Forbes explained:

The Ministry said in a note published on Tuesday that it is considering the introduction of a withdrawal mechanism to force near-bankrupt automakers out of the bloated automotive industry.  China has around 1,300 automobile makers, including 171 car, truck and bus makers and more than 900 specialty vehicle manufacturers, according to the government.
Nearly a quarter of these manufacturers are on the verge of bankruptcy, barely producing anything despite obtaining production approvals from supervising authorities, the statement said.

Restructuring with Chinese characteristics
The announcement of forced restructuring of the automotive sector is interesting because it shows the role of the state in dictating the policy direction for much of the industry.  State involvement has been a feature of industry restructuring throughout China's history, and most notably during the aftermath of the Asian crisis, when  many International Trading and Investment Corporations (ITICs) - forerunners of current Local Government Financing Vehicles and investment trusts, collapsed and when the banking system was restructured.

At the time, there was no advanced nor comprehensive bankruptcy law governing the restructuring of state-owned entities and private entities.  As William Gamble, an investor with experience in that period has noted, the bankruptcy legislation applicable in 1998, when GITIC collapsed, did not recognise security interests or allow for restructuring (nor could foreigners' investments into ITICS even be registered with Chinese regulators).

A new bankruptcy regime, which is more sophisticated and borrows elements from US legislation and other jurisdictions was implemented in 2007, but its effectiveness remains to be seen as courts and other officials establish a practice of using and enforcing the new regime.  Also in a new trend, Simon Rabinovitch in an FT article this week, noted that more parties seem to be using local courts to resolve contractual and debt claims across a number of Chinese regions.  

It seems there is much more than just a simple increase in litigation volumes - generally speaking local and regional state authorities, with their close ties to businesses seem to play a very dominant role in either leading arrangements to stave off bankruptcy (causing a lighter caseload and a slimmer practice of dealing with bankruptcies) or as in the case of the automotive industry - taking a dominant role in which foreign investors may be marginalised and/or unfamiliar.  Reports of the pending bankruptcy of the Zhongdan Guarantee company (which was exposed by the collapse of the Tianyu Construction Company and 600 companies which were connected to it by a network of guarantees) indicate that the Beijing city government is directing the restructuring response which is expected to get underway later this month.  And Zhongdan apparently was also involved in selling WMPs (below).  Should there be more businesses like Zhongdan to be bankrupted, this could lead to a deterioration of market sentiment and intensification of any crisis, should it arise in China.

"No touch" regulation
Watchers of Chinese bank finances noticed a shrinking of deposits and increase in interbank liabilities in bank capital reports which many commentators are blaming on the rise of WMPs - wealth management products, unregulated speculative investments which Chinese banks have been using to source new loan capital and which are popular with bank customers as they offer interest rates far above regulated deposits.

Nothing wrong with little or no regulation in the short term (in China) you might think, however it has emerged that many of the products do not have recourse to specific assets and are increasingly appearing to have the characteristics of a pyramid or ponzi scheme (with there not being enough assets to cover redemption requests or meet all obligations), the collapse of which could trigger financial contagion.  An excellent Reuters piece uncovered one product which it likened to an American subprime mortgage (of dubious quality), being marketed to the public under the name "Golden Elephant" and whose source of income derived from property assets which were yet to be built.

While Chinese regulated banks themselves have questions to answer regarding their NPLs (which may challenge their solvency) the growth of WMPs and so-called "shadow banks" could threaten a significant crisis in the Chinese financial system.  Recent discussions on various blogs this week reminded that there are a number of precedents of this sort of scheme which could equally apply to China.  For both Russia and Albania in the 1990s (and Poland in the last few years), pyramid and ponzi schemes were able to flourish escaping weak and slow moving regulators in a changing environment and, upon collapse, causing great damage to the economy.  A great paper on the Albanian pyramid scheme phenomenon is here, while in Russia, the famous MMM and GKO scandals (the latter of which contributed to the collapse of the Russian government and precipitated the 1998 Asian crisis) have been well written about (Sergei Mavrodi restarted a new MMM-style scheme online last year).

How it all plays out in China will remain to be seen.

China's adventures

Intrigues and dramas
This week saw news from China dominating broadcasts as political and economic affairs escalated.  The cracks in Party unity were exposed following the arrest of Gu Kailai for the murder of Neil Heywood, a British businessman who had assisted her and her husband, Bo Xilai, the former mayor of Chongqing and popular politician who was dismissed from the Central Committee and the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (following his dismissal from the position of mayor of Chongqing).

News services struggled to delve into the political circumstances underlying Bo's dismissal, subsequent reports have looked at allegations of corruption involving Bo and his associates, long term rivalries with other factions in the ruling elite and the significant business dealings of his wife as well as the circumstances of Mr Heywood's death.  Needless to say there was as much intrigue and mystery as a feudal saga.

One way to navigate the landscape in China (c) Chooseco LLC

An interesting economic statistic
Meanwhile there was much talk about the lower than expected first quarter GDP figure of 8.1% released on Friday for which there wasn't a consensus.  The range of views on the GDP figure included:


i) the Chinese economy is re-accelerating: DBS Bank of Singapore seem to be the strongest proponent of this view, mostly relying on GDP and inflation growth.  Definitely too bullish - Zerohedge, the economics website, tweeted that DBS overestimated the GDP number at 9% in an advance research note (and labelled DBS a "3rd tier research firm").  DBS may have a point regarding inflation (see below).

ii) the Chinese economy is growing, but at a slower pace:  Richard Jerrum, economist at the Bank of Singapore painted a favourable picture of the Chinese economy based on low inflation, sufficient capital investment and decent property growth (with means to stimulate) in an interview with Reuters.  The World Bank echoed this in its favourable report on Thursday which cut its growth forecast to 8.2 per cent for 2012 emphasising the success so far in cooling the property sector and remaining available tools for the central bank to inject liquidity.  This would be the case for a "soft landing" which the World Bank predicted as highly likely.  And Standard Chartered's Stephen Green also favoured a soft landing, expecting continued capacity for growth across the economy, a strong labour market and broad scope of tools available to the central bank.

The problem with the soft landing view its critics say, is that the underlying assumptions are simply not true, i.e. inflation is high, the property market is in a slump and the central bank does not have as many tools at its disposal (or as much scope to use them).

iii) the Chinese economy is contracting or not growing:  One key point for the hard-landing proponents is that there is simply too big a credibility gap to take statistics of the Chinese economy at face value.  The FT Alphaville blog published a short but interesting article (inspired by the above book on China) detailing a number of recent statistics which showed significant variation depending on their source or were significantly inconsistent with related statistics. The notable example was the Purchasing Manager's Index (a measure of manufacturing activity) - the official Chinese figure showed expansion while HSBC's figure showed contraction.

There was equal scepticism from some towards the inflation figures (via the Consumer Price Index which was recorded at 3.6% for March (announced at the start of the week). Not only was this number higher than expected, but Patrick Chovanec commented in an interview with Bloomberg prior to the release that a figure of such magnitude seemed vastly understated and as evidence he noted the 33% increase in the cost of his milk supply (although on Twitter he added that he thought it was due to increased delivery charges rather than the milk itself!).  More seriously he noted that in all his recent discussions with business people across China he did not come across an outlook of low inflation and higher growth consistent with a soft landing.

Meanwhile although Stephen Green's team have done some updating research which showed a recent pick up in construction activity and improvements in sentiments of developers this was tempered by research suggesting that activity is being driven in a large part through financing from less regulated shadow banking, including loans from investment trusts, which may not be a sustainable source of finance. And as mentioned in the FT Alphaville note, this week saw what could be the first bankruptcy of a property developer in China.

And a couple of articles in Reuters pointed out that tools of the central bank to stimulate demand had already been brought into use since 2011 (through cuts to the amounts of capital the banks hold, the required reserve ratio, in 2011) with resulting significant amounts of new lending likely to complicate the central bank's monetary operations in the future.  Jeremy Stevens, an economist for Standard Bank in Beijing summed up the mood:

Overall conditions seem to have stabilized, but it wouldn't take much to push sentiment in the wrong direction...

In any case due to factors like the excessive extent of local government debts and the shadow banking sector it was argued by James Kynge in the Financial Times last year that the powers of the central monetary authorities to control the supply  and price of credit are "tenuous".  A couple of others were more upfront - Satyajit Das wrote a follow-up piece to his last effort in the Australian media where he referred to recent Chinese growth as an "illusion", while economist Jim Walker in an interview with Reuters stated "economies don't have soft landings".

iv) the Chinese economy has reached the bottom and is rising again (though not necessarily fast): This view was put forward by a number of people who considered the possibility of a hard landing but had felt optimistic with recent figures. Some examples included Karine Hern of East Capital (from the property perspective) and Zhiwei Zhang of Nomura who revised his bearish estimate on GDP growth this week on a view of increased economic output and lending.  As the Beyond Brics post noted (and was noted elsewhere) the significant growth element of consumption included government spending which may have distorted the measure showing stimulus rather than genuine growth.

The verdict from the markets was negative - stockmarkets worldwide slumped on the expectation of lower growth going forwards, especially as the GDP figure was the lowest comparatively in a number of years.  Noel Roubini's report picked up on this and in a tweet he commented that the GDP figure may in fact have been 6.9%.

Unlike in the adventure books where the reader can flick through to see what outcome will occur following his choice, we will have to wait and see.

China maneuvers

Theatre in the capital
Not only the National People's conference but some of the sideline events grabbed press attention.  Comment about Bo Xilai has flourished this week as many have looked to interpret what it means for the Chinese Communist Party's strategic direction and generational handover which will see the ascent of Xi Jinping later this year.  The Daily Mail had a piece explaining there was nothing to worry about from this episode of party infighting, while pieces in the Economist and the Telegraph  helped put the events in broader context.  There were plenty of pictures of Bo seemingly looking rather unimpressed with the whole affair.  Bo's own comments to the media before his dismissal from the post of mayor of Chongqing had been to politely to defend his actions in office, while plenty of others commented on prospects of his allies also being purged.

Bo Xilai has been purged

However that was not the only sideshow, as late in the week saw reports of rumours of an attempted coup in the communist party headquarters in Beijing, though later dismissed in the media as misinterpretation of sightings of a military escort for a North Korean delegation.  Amidst tight monitoring of internet blogs, eager Chinese bloggers were reported to be using special code words to evade blocks by the authorities.

While the Chinese government will no doubt be taking many steps to reassume control of events and their reporting, one change reported mostly in the legal press was quite ominous.  Chinese lawyers must now swear an oath of allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party, which seems a regressive step.  Security officials have been summoned to Beijing for "retraining" and a pro-reform professor at the University of Peking was allegedly detained after calling for a national protest.

All in the details
As usual a rolling debate continued as to what sort of landing China would be having in the near future.  The latest instalment saw Patrick Chovanec exchange paragraphs with Andrew Batson in the Guardian.  And Jim Rogers, a previous China bull was announced to be bearish on Chinese stocks for the short term at least.  Amongst all such debates a point that should be considered is how reliable information experts rely upon about China is.

There have been doubts about the collection and reporting of government and private statistics - a recent article in Bloomberg explored the issue while new measures by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), hailed by state press as aimed to improve accuracy were also characterised as being aimed at stopping explicit manipulation.

A good example of the role statistics can play in the analysis came this week with two analyses of the Chinese property market which looked at whether there will be a crash in the sector.  Note that Chinese property prices have been sliding for months.  Not a collapse, but a slowdown and consistent with other emerging markets says Kenneth Raposa on a Forbes blog. Kenneth had based his analysis in a large part on statistics from the NBS which suffer from the flaws mentioned above.  Not so say the team from Societe Generale.  While they may be using the same figures as Raposa (along with a PPI metric) they seem to draw their conclusion from a national aggregated basis (the brief note I saw on FT Alphaville did not explain their methodology) to conclude "Chinese property sales and prices have made for dour reading recently" and that taking into account different metrics "arguably the results are a lot worse".

As with any statistics there remain outliers and there were a couple of reminders of the need to be vigilant for unlikely though extreme risks which could affect China.  Analyst Nick Lardy gave some comments on risks of Chinese citizens pulling funds from the property sector to invest in equities precipating a sector slump, while Yu Bin of the Development Research Centre noted remaining risks from the global downturn.

Banks under attack

In addition to criticism over the credit controls which allow banks to fix high margins and take excess profits, there was also futher comment as to the extent which they had underestimated bad loans.  Regulators are starting to take note of the criticisms and the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) was noted to have had direct communications with some lenders, in what could be the first steps of action which could lead to banks reclassifying the loans and suffering big losses.  A suitably stern looking picture of the coat of arms of the CBRC was also published:

At least one proper use for all the copper stored in Chinese warehouses

But aside from intervention at the top, there is likely to be more news of banking stress at the business level. Caixin magazine had an excellent report of malpractice and rising defaults at loan guarantee company Zhongdan.  What is worrying is not only the apparent prevalence of loan malfeasance (which reminds of the recent US mortgage auto-form filling scandal) but that the company was intermixing risky private lending activities with its regular guarantee business.

And stress in the financing sector seems to be feeding into the general economy.  Not only did this week see an increase in petrol prices for chinese consumers (with the largest increase in three years), but inflation in basic commodities has reappeared with increases in the price of onions.  As this note from an FT blog explains the price increase had been in part due to the tight financing environment: 

But farmers, who have difficulty obtaining bank loans, rely on money lenders to cover a large portion of their cold storage costs. So when the lenders' interest rates shot up last year to as much as 60 per cent, farmers cut their losses and let their green onions rot. 

As the blog noted there had been previous commodity panics, such as with garlic and pork. One hopes the Chinese consumer won't have his or her dinner interrupted by too many other factors any time soon!