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China’s trade surplus in June was $46.2 billion, for a total of $154.4 trillion in Q2. Last month I suggested that China’s Q2 trade surplus would be 4-5% of the period's GDP. It came in around 4.4%. In Q1 the trade surplus was $12.8 billion, or around ...
xinhuanet.com/english/2020-0…
...0.4% of GDP. For the first half of the year, then, China's trade surplus was $167.2 billion, or about 2.4% of GDP.

We can't really compare the numbers because of the impact of Covid-19, but in 2019, the Q1 trade surplus was $72.9 billion and in Q2 it...
...was $103.9 billion, or about 2.6% of the period's GDP during the first half of the year. During all of 2019, the trade surplus was 1.7% of GDP. I expect this year’s trade surplus to be double that level.
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Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
The Shanghai Composite closed up 1.8% today. I expect it will surge on the back of Thursday's economic data release. Since mid-February I've argued that GDP growth would surprise on the downside in Q1 and -- given the expected policy reaction -- on the upside in Q2, and so...
...will almost certainly be seen as a strong buy signal for retail investors. For me the big problem with Thursday's GDP data is that most of the strength is likely to be in supply-side indicators, and not on the demand side. That distinction, however, will be...
...largely ignored by investors (and by most analysts for that matter).
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Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
Beijing issued a record RMB 12.1 trillion of total social financing in the first six months of 2020 (to RMB 271.8 trillion). This represents an 8.2% increase in TSF in the first six months of 2020 and a 12.8% increase since last June (compared to...

scmp.com/economy/china-…
...6.2% and 11.2%, respectively, in the previous year).

Of course what matters is not just the rise in debt but the rise relative to debt-payment capacity, for which nominal GDP is a (very rough) proxy. At the end of 2018, TSF was 248% of GDP. At the...
...end of 2019 it was 254%. The ratio soared to 270% in the first quarter of this year because of the contraction in GDP, and while we don’t have second quarter economic data yet, assuming that nominal GDP growth in the first half of the year was up just a little, TSF will...
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Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
The US has 4.2% of the world’s population and, according to the Johns Hopkins University data, 23.9% of its reported Covid-19 deaths. I am no epidemiologist, but the arithmetic seems pretty straightforward: until now, the average American has been 7.1 times as likely to die of...
...Covid-19 as the average non-American. Given that President Bush was supposed to have left the US with the best pandemic response in the world, and that his program was continued under President Obama, we would normally have expected the opposite: that the average American...
...should have been less likely to die from a global pandemic than the average non-American.

This isn't much consolation, but the US wasn't the only country whose citizens were far, far more likely to die of Covid-19 than its non-citizens. Here is a table of selected
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