by Loki » Tue 18 Feb 2014, 00:17:53
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dorlomin', 'T')ick tock
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26225205Floods and snows and climate are grabbing the headlines, but the ravenous beast of deflation is sniffing fresh blood. Be a little while yet. Enjoy your stimulus funded "growth".
Good article. Does not bode well for the Great Recovery.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 't')he economic slowdown evident in China, coupled with recent manifestations of tension in its financial markets, can be seen as the third wave of the global financial crisis which began in 2007-08 (the first wave was the Wall Street and City debacle of 2007-08; the second was the eurozone crisis).
...
After the crash, thanks to the stimulus and the unleashing of all that construction, investment surged to an unprecedented 50% of GDP, where it has more or less stayed.
Here is the thing: when a big economy is investing at that pace to generate wealth and jobs, it is a racing certainty that much of it will never generate an economic return, that the investment is way beyond what rational decision-making would have produced.
That is why in China, there are vast residential developments and even a whole city where the lights are never on and why there are gleaming motorways barely tickled by traffic.
But what makes much of the spending and investment toxic is the way it was financed: there has been an explosion of lending. China's debts as a share of GDP have been rising at a very rapid rate of around 15% of GDP, or national output, annually and have increased since 2008 from around 125% of GDP to 200%.
The analyst Charlene Chu, late of Fitch, gave a resonant synoptic description of this credit binge:
"Most people are aware we've had a credit boom in China but they don't know the scale. At the beginning of all of this in 2008, the Chinese banking sector was roughly $10 trillion in size. Right now it's in the order of $24 to $25 trillion.
"That incremental increase of $14 to $15 trillion is the equivalent of the entire size of the US commercial banking sector, which took more than a century to build. So that means China will have replicated the entire US system in the span of half a decade." But then again, what could possibly go wrong with easy credit? Growth is always good, right?