Iniciado por Xiao Fu

^^ China quiere construir una red de ferrocarril euroasiática, y es impulsora del proyecto de conectar el estrecho de Bering. Se están preparando para eso.

Iniciado por a la ruina

¿Tu crees que será más barato transportar por ferrocarril en trenes que en europa no pueden pasar de los 750m que en portacontenedores postpanamax? El transporte en barco siempre ha sido más barato.

Y no os creais que todo lo que se fabrica en China se puede relocalizar. Por lo pronto, ellos controlan la mayoría de recursos en explotación de tierras raras, vitales para fabricar todo tipo de electrónica.

10:00:39 h. China, siempre China Serenity markets

Dice hoy un alto cargo del Banco Central Chino que la inflación sigue siendo alta tras el dato de agosto. En su opinión, esto obliga a mantener una política monetaria prudente. Lo interesante es su explicación: los factores inflacionistas han sido en su mayor parte controlados, pero no eliminados.

La mayoría del mercado, incluidos nosotros, consideran que la inflación tocó techo en julio en niveles del 6.5 %. El dato de agosto ha mostrado una moderación hasta un 6.2 % de cifra anual.

Pero no es el único dato conocido en China en los dos últimos días.
En definitiva:

* Esperábamos un dato de inflación más moderado en agosto, en buena parte por el mayor crecimiento del previsto para los alimentos (13.4 % anual). ¿Hasta qué punto la subida de los precios de los alimentos es cíclica o estructural? Entendemos la cautela de las autoridades, aunque también descartamos más medidas restrictivas en política monetaria en lo que resta del año.
* Los precios al por mayor suben un 7.3 % anual, también más moderado que el 7.5 % anterior. Esperamos una mayor moderación en el futuro.
* Se modera el crecimiento de la producción industrial en julio hasta un 13.5 %, frente al 14 % anterior. Esto se explica tanto por la moderación de las exportaciones como por los problemas de capacidad energética en algunas zonas
* La inversión también se modera hasta un 25 % en los ocho primeros meses del año, con un crecimiento anual en agosto del 22.9 % frente al 24.5 % anterior. Pero la inversión residencial crece a ritmos del 33.2 % cuando la inversión en capacidad en el sector manufacturero lo hace a ritmos del 32.2 %.
* Las ventas al por menor crecen un 17.2 % en agosto, sin grandes cambios sobre el mes anterior.
* La liquidez medida por M2 ha moderado su crecimiento hasta una tasa anual del 13.5 %. Es el más bajo desde 2004.
* La balanza comercial ha cerrado en agosto con un superávit de 17.8 bn. desde los 31.5 bn. de julio. Se esperaba un dato por encima de 23.4 bn. Esto se debe a la fuerte aceleración de las importaciones, a ritmos del 30 % anual (20.4 % exportaciones). En los ocho primeros meses el saldo comercial positivo ha sido de 92.7 bn. con un descenso del 10 % anual. Las importaciones.

Nosotros aún esperamos un crecimiento este año en niveles del 9 %. Pero vemos que la moderación se prolongue para el próximo ejercicio, cuando esperamos un dato cercano al 8.5 %.

José Luis Martínez Campuzano
Estratega de Citi en España

Iniciado por a la ruina

Y no os creais que todo lo que se fabrica en China se puede relocalizar. Por lo pronto, ellos controlan la mayoría de recursos en explotación de tierras raras, vitales para fabricar todo tipo de electrónica.

Who are the world's biggest employers?

Sep 12th 2011, 13:37 by The Economist online

ONE of the biggest headaches for policymakers in many rich countries has been how to create jobs during a period of fiscal austerity and anaemic growth. The private sector has been slow to generate jobs, and government-spending cuts usually end up cutting jobs. And governments employ a lot of people: in our chart of the ten biggest global employers, below, seven are government-run. America's defence department had 3.2m people on its payroll last year, equivalent to 1% of the country's population. China, the world's most populous nation and a big military spender, employs 2.3m people in its armed forces. And the number of people working for the National Health Service in England is equivalent to over 2.5% of the country's population. The three private companies are Walmart, McDonald's and Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, a subsidiary of which is Foxconn, a secretive electronics manufacturer.

China risks hard landing as global woes spread

China's carefully-managed soft landing is turning harder by the day, threatening to deflate the torrid credit bubble of the past three years.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, In Dalian

6:23PM BST 15 Sep 2011

"There is a large potential risk," said Zhu Min, the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a former Chinese official.

Mr Zhu said China had doubled the loan ratio from below 100pc of GDP before the Lehman crisis to roughly 200pc today.

The danger is that this excess could start to unwind just as the West goes into a sharp downturn, and possibly a double-dip recession.

China and emerging Asia are fundamentally in weaker shape this time, having used up their "fiscal cushions", leaving them with little leeway to cope with a fresh global shock. Their monetary policies are already loose.

"We're at a key moment. They need to make sure their economies don't slow down too fast," he said at the World Economic Forum in Dalian.

China's electricity use – closely watched as the economy's true pulse – was almost flat over the summer. Export orders fell 3.3pc in August, with the PMI index down to a 28-month low. Inventories have jumped.

The M2 money supply has dropped from its normal growth rate of 18pc to 20pc to nearer 12pc over the past three months (annualised). "A hard landing is already in progress," said Diana Choyleva from Lombard Street Research.

Beijing has actively sought to cool overheating, alarmed by inflation above 6pc and price-to-income ratios for property in the rich coastal cities nearing wild extremes of 20. But it does not want the economy to jerk violently from boom to bust.

The historic pattern of global crises is that the region emerging strongest is often prey to its own crisis three years' later or so, usually because it was able to respond with a blast of credit that stored up problems for the future.

Japan brushed off the 1987 crash, only to succumb in 1990: the US dodged the Asian crisis in 1998, only to face the dotcom collapse in 2001.

Fitch Ratings said it may downgrade China if the banks get into trouble, requiring another bail-out from Beijing.

The agency said in July that credit growth was still running at a 38pc increase this year, if you include off-books financing such as letters of credit, trust loans and loans from Hong Kong banks. "Leverage is higher than meets the eye. China's banking system is the largest, fastest-growing, but most thinly capitalised among emerging markets," said the report's author, Charlene Chu.

Some 55pc of all new lending now comes from outside the banking system, three times the level in 2006. "That China's economy is slowing while financing is still so abundant illustrates how dependent growth remains on loose funding," she said

The economic return on each extra yuan of credit collapsed from 0.75pc to 0.18pc during the credit spree after Lehman. It has yet to recover fully.

Mrs Chu said China's credit boom does not match Iceland – which saw credit to GDP rise from 130pc to 440pc over five years – but is significantly worse than the jump in the US before the sub-prime crisis, or even in Japan before the Nikkei bubble burst.

"Such a rapid run-up in leverage is a sign that the incremental return on credit has declined, meaning that borrowers' ability to repay is not keeping pace," said Fitch. The agency fears that non-performing loans could rise from 2pc of GDP last year to up to 30pc.

China's central bank has belatedly begun to tackle off-books lending, on top of interest rate rises and a relentless increase in the reserve ratio to 21.5pc.

It now targeting the methods used to circumvent monetary controls, according to the authoritative Caixin Magazine. The regulators aim to choke off $150bn in credit over the next six months.

Yet as the government tightens the screw, it risks knocking away the rickety props beneath China's local governments, which have built up $1.7 trillion of liabilities in a patronage spree. The localities depend on land sales for 40pc of their income.

"If we have a hard landing, the government is not going to be able to pay salaries," said Wang Jianlin, Dalian's biggest property developer.

What is clear is that if Europe and America fall back into recession, China will not be able to buttress the global economy a second time.

China 'faces subprime credit bubble crisis'

Monetary tightening in China threatens to pop the $1.7 trillion (£1.07 trillion) credit bubble in local government finance and expose the country's simmering "subprime" crisis, according to the Communist Party's economic guru.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Dalian

7:00PM BST 17 Sep 2011

Cheng Siwei, head of Beijing's International Finance Forum and a former deputy speaker of the People's Congress, said interest rate rises and credit curbs to cool overheating were inflicting real pain on thousands of companies used by local party bosses to fund the construction boom.

"The tightening policy is creating a lot of difficulties for local governments trying to repay debt, and is causing defaults," he told a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Dalian. "Our version of subprime in the US is lending to local authorities and the government is taking this very seriously."

"Everybody assumes that they will be bailed out by the central government if they default, but I disagree with this. It means that the people will ultimately pay the bill for it all, at a cost to the broader welfare."

"Those who are not highly indebted are forced to help those who are," he said, echoing the debate over moral hazard that has divided opinion in the West since the banking rescues.

Local governments have created more than 6,000 arms-length companies to circumvent restrictions on bond issuance, creating a huge patronage machine for party bosses that has largely escaped central control.

The audit office said the loans have reached $1.7 trillion (£1 trillion). While some of the money has been used to finance much-needed investments in water systems and roads, a large part has fuelled unbridled construction with a dubious rate of return.

The local governments depend on land sales for 40pc of their revenue so the process has become incestuous and self-feeding. Such reliance on property sales revenues has greatly aggravated the post-bubble crisis in Ireland.

Mr Cheng said China is entering a "very tough period" as growth runs into the inflation buffers, threatening the sort of incipient stagflation seen in the West in the 1970s and leaving the central bank with an unpleasant choice. "The inflation rate and the growth rate are conflicting with each other: it is very troubling," he said, describing what is known to economists as the Phillips Curve dilemma.

Can China escape as world's debt crisis reaches Act III?

When America became the first casualty of the global credit bubble in 2007, Europe's political elites thought it had nothing to do with them.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Beijing

6:30PM BST 18 Sep 2011

Even after Lehman and AIG collapsed a year later -- and Europe's economy crashed into slump -- it remained an article of faith in Berlin, Paris, and Rome that this was just fall-out from the Anglo-Saxon casino.

Few understood that the `China Effect' had engendered credit bubbles everywhere, and that Europe's variant was even more pernicious because euro-banks were more leveraged, with much greater liabilities, and the structure of EMU concentrated the damage on weaker states with no policy defence against sovereign collapse.

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner must have felt a twinge of Schadenfreude as he exhorted EU finance ministers in Poland to rescue their banks or face "catastrophe". The Germans and Austrians barked back at him, of course, but at least debate is joined.

Europe cannot blame America any longer, and if the US really were to slash spending right now -- as Germany's finance minister seems to want, like the disastrous Bruning, circa 1931 -- EMU would be in even deeper trouble.

In my view, Germany's austerity nihilism will precipitate a dramatic policy shift by the US over coming months. The risk -- or solution -- is that Washington will write off Europe as irretrievably hopeless and re-order the global landscape. The US will not let free-riders exploit is its precious stimulus forever. It may seek to form a global growth bloc, open only to stimulators. And woe betide Germany. But that is a column for another day.

By the "China Effect", I mean the Asian trade tsunami that flooded Western markets and deflated the price of everything from shoes and clothes, to washing machines and solar panels. This seduced Western central banks into running uber-loose monetary policies for twenty years, and disguised the build-up of dangerous asset bubbles.

It was coupled with Asia's "Savings Glut", as Ben Bernanke calls it. The rising powers accumulated $10 trillion of reserves, either because they were holding down currencies to gain trade share, or because their economic and social structure was geared towards mercantilism and excess output.

China's consumption rate has fallen to 36pc of GDP from 48pc in the late 1990s. Academic libraries are bursting with PhD papers trying to explain why. Some posit the welfare theory, arguing that aging citizens must save for a future with almost no pension or health provision; others that China has frantically leveraged an infrastructure and manufacturing boom to buy time and contain the wrath of 200m migrant workers.

Whatever the mix: there is simply too much global investment, and too little consumption. The system is out of joint. It does not feel like the 1930s because we are richer in the West, with a better safety net, and emergency stimulus has so far cushioned the effects, but Bertil Ohlin, John Maynard Keynes, and Irving Fisher would find it unnervingly familiar.

The Savings Glut flooded global bond markets, especially the EMU markets as central banks rotated into euros. Hence the collapse in yields during the long bubble. Pension funds were forced to search for better return in ever riskier countries and assets to match their liablities.

This is why Greece was able to borrow for ten years at 26 basis points over Bunds, and Spain at four points of spread at the end of the boom, and why Italy's €1.8 trillion public debt did not seem to be a problem. It hid all sins.

Capital was hanging from the lowest branches, almost free for all. America took it, Britain took it, Iceland took it (a lot), and Euroland took it.

Yet China itself must ultimately be a victim of this warped structure as well, and that is where we are in late 2011. Act III of the global denouement is unfolding. The world will have to lance the debt boils of Asia as well before clearing the way for another cycle of global growth.

The facts are simple. China dodged the Great Contraction of 2008-2009 by unleashing credit on a massive scale.

Zhu Min, the IMF's deupty chief and a former Chinese official, said loans had jumped from 100pc of GDP before the crisis to around 200pc today -- if you include off-books financing from letters of credits, trusts, and such like.

To put this in perspective, a study by Fitch Ratings found that credit in America rose by just 42pc of GDP in the five-year period before the housing bubble popped. It rose by 45pc of GDP in Japan from before the Nikkei cracked in 1990, and 47pc before the Korean crisis in 1998.

Home construction is running at 10pc of GDP, about the same as Spain in the`burbuja' of late 2006, and much higher than in either Korea or Japan at any point during their catch-up Tiger phases.

"China's banking system is the largest, fastest-growing, but most thinly capitalized among emerging markets. Such a rapid run-up in leverage is a sign that the incremental return on credit has declined," said Fitch. The economic boost from each extra yuan of credit collapsed from 0.75pc to 0.18pc during the crisis and has yet to recover.

My impression from China's "Summer Davos" in Dalian is that Beijing's elite is less deluded about the risks than Europe's leaders were for so long.

"The whole world needs to lower its expectations from China," said Lee Kaifu, the country's software mogul. "There is an even bigger threat than a global double-dip, and that is a prolonged recession with no growth and very limited policies to fight it. We are already in it."

Cheng Siwei, head of Beijing's International Finance Forum and a former vice-president of the Communist party's Standing Comittee, said China is entering a "very tough period" as growth runs into the inflation buffers, paralysing the central bank.

"The inflation rate and the growth rate are conflicting with each other: it is very troubling," he said. China faces the sort of the incipient stagflation that hit the West in the 1970s.

Matters have reached the point that even a light tap on the brakes by China's central bank -- through credit curbs (deposit rates are still minus 3pc in real terms) -- is already threatening a hard-landing.

Dr Cheng said local authorities had built up $1.7 trillion in debt, mostly using arms-length finance vehicles. This is coming back to haunt. "The tightening policy is creating a lot of difficulties and causing defaults. This is our version of subprime in the US, and the government is taking this very seriously," he said.

Whether the housing market will also set off a chain of defaults is the great question dividing analysts. "Decidely bubbly," is the IMF's politically-correct view. Its own data shows that price to incomes ratios range from 16 to 22 in the Eastern cities of Shenzen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin, multiples of the worst extremes in the very tame US boom.

Caixin Magazine reports that Guangzhou R&F Properties is slashing prices by 20pc, and other big developers may soon follow.

China has not abolished economic gravity. Its policy of yuan suppression against the dollar and euro has been impossible to sterilize, leading to an imported credit bubble of epic proportions. Its export-led strategy has left it with a deformed economy that relies on perma-demand from exhausted debtors in America and Europe.

As China premier Wen Jiabao said in Dalian, "China's development is not yet balanced, coordinated and sustainable." The next five-year plan is a breakneck switch towards a domestic growth. Bravo, but awfully late.

China is acutely vulnerable to the second leg of depression in the West -- should that occur -- and cannot conjure a second rabbit out of the hat. This will not stop the rise of China as the great force of 21st Century, any more than America's jolting upset in 1930 stopped US ascendancy.

Yet economic history has taught us two iron-clad rules. There is no escape from credit hangovers, and surplus trading powers suffer just as much as deficit states -- if not more --once Kondratieff slumps turn really serious.

Iniciado por Serpiente_Plyskeen

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, sigue en su línea de vais-a-morir-todos-menos-yo (por cierto que parece ser una actitud bastante frecuente en pro-británicos). Lo que no quita que vaya(n) a acabar teniendo razón, vaya.

China risks hard landing as global woes spread - Telegraph

Iniciado por jgl

¿Nos hemos olvidado de China?


El mundo financiero está centrando su atención en el desarrollo de la crisis de deuda en la eurozona, relegando a un segundo plano lo que antes era la "madre de todas las incertidumbres" la economía estadounidense y la posible entrada en doble recesión. Pero, hay una incógnita que, aún pesando decisivamente en el devenir de los mercados, está pasando totalmente desapercibida: la situación económica en China. En la última recesión estadounidense y europea, China se mostró tremendamente resistente impidiendo que el mundo desarrollado pasara de la recesión a la depresión. Sin embargo, las cosas pueden ser muy distintas si finalmente Estados Unidos entra en "double dip".

El subdirector gerente del Fondo Monetario Internacional y ex-funcionario chino, Zhu Min, ha comentado que existe un riesgo potencial importante en China.

Zhu dijo que China ha duplicado la proporción de préstamos desde por debajo del 100% del PIB antes de la crisis de Lehman hasta el 200% de ahora.

Tal y como apunta Ambrose Evans en un editorial en el Telegraph, el peligro es que este exceso pueda empezar a manifestarse ahora ante una fuerte caída de la economía occidental, y posiblemente una doble recesión.

China y la Asia emergente están, desde un punto de vista fundamental, más débiles en esta ocasión, después de haber agotado sus colchones fiscales, dejándoles poco margen de maniobra para hacer frente a un nuevo shock global. Sus políticas monetarias ya están relajadas.

“Estamos en un momento clave. Necesitan asegurarse de que sus economías no se desaceleran demasiado rápido”, dijo Zhu en el Foro Económico Mundial en Dalian.

El uso de electricidad en China - un indicador que se sigue muy como verdadero pulso real de la economía - tuvo un crecimiento casi plano durante el verano. Los pedidos de exportación cayeron un 3,3% en agosto, con el índice PMI en un mínimo de 28 meses. Los inventarios han aumentado.

La oferta monetaria M2 se ha reducido desde su tasa de crecimiento normal del 18-20% al 12% durante los últimos tres meses (anualizada). Un hard-landing o aterrizaje forzoso de su economía ya está en marcha, señala Diana Choyleva de Lombard Street Research.

Beijing ha buscado activamente enfriar el sobrecalentamiento económico, alarmado por una inflación por encima del 6% y ratio precio a ingresos para las viviendas en las ricas ciudades de la costa alcanzando salvajes extremos del 20%. Pero, por otra parte, las autoridades no quieren que los precios se dirijan violentamente del boom al crash.

Evans destaca que el patrón histórico de las crisis mundiales señala que la región más fuerte en ese momento es a menudo víctima de su propia crisis después de tres años o menos, ya que normalmente fue capaz de responder con una explosión de crédito que supone problemas en el futuro. Japón se libró la crisis de 1987, sólo para sucumbir en 1990: los EE.UU. esquivó la crisis asiática en 1998 sólo para enfrentarse al colapso de las puntocom en el año 2001.

Fitch Ratings dijo que podría rebajar la calificación de China, si los bancos en problemas requieren otro rescate del gobierno.

La agencia dijo en julio que el crecimiento del crédito todavía estaba en una pauta del 38% durante este año, si se incluye financiación fuera de libros. “El apalancamiento es mayor de lo que parece. El sistema bancario chino es el más grande y de más rápido crecimiento, pero en general poco capitalizado respecto al resto de mercados emergentes”, dijo el autor del informe, Charlene Chu.

En torno al 55% de todos los préstamos nuevos ya vienen de fuera del sistema bancario, tres veces el nivel de 2006. “Que la economía china se está desacelerando, mientras la financiación sigue siendo tan abundante ilustra cómo el crecimiento depende de la financiación” dijo.

La rentabilidad económica de cada uno de los yuanes adicionales de crédito se derrumbó desde el 0.75% al 0.18% después de Lehman. Aún no se ha recuperado totalmente.

Charlene Chu dijo que el auge del crédito en China no es el mismo que se vio en Islandia - aumentó desde el 130% del PIB al 440% en cinco años - pero es mucho peor que en Estados Unidos antes de la crisis sub-prime, o incluso en Japón antes de que la burbuja estallara.

“Esa rápida subida en el apalancamiento es una señal de que el beneficio en el crédito ha disminuido, lo que significa que la capacidad de pago de los deudores no mantiene el ritmo”, dijo Fitch. La agencia teme que la morosidad pueda aumentar desde el 2% del último año hasta el 30%.

El Banco central de China ha retrasado su ofensiva sobre los préstamos fuera de libros, incrementando los tipos de interés y un incesante aumento en el coeficiente de reservas bancarias.

Ahora se está centrando en los métodos utilizados para eludir los controles monetarios, de acuerdo con Caixin Magazine. Los reguladores pretenden restringir 150.000 millones de dólares en créditos durante los próximos seis meses.

Sin embargo, a la vez que el gobierno aprieta los tornillos, corre el riesgo de golpear los débiles puntales de los gobiernos locales de China, que han acumulado 1,7 billón de dólares en pasivos en una fiesta sin fin. El 40% de los ingresos de los gobiernos locales dependen de la venta de tierras.

“Si tenemos un aterrizaje forzoso el gobierno no va a ser capaz de pagar los salarios”, dijo Wang Jianlin, el mayor promotor inmobiliario de Dalian.

“Lo que está claro es que si Europa y Estados Unidos vuelven a caer en recesión, China no será capaz de apuntalar la economía mundial por segunda vez”, dice Evans.

Fuentes: Ambrose Evans

La Carta de la Bolsa - ¿Nos hemos olvidado de China?


China to 'liquidate' US Treasuries, not dollars

China to 'liquidate' US Treasuries, not dollars – Telegraph Blogs

El uso de electricidad en China - un indicador que se sigue muy como verdadero pulso real de la economía - tuvo un crecimiento casi plano durante el verano.