1/5
Growth in Chinese debt continues to be very high. According to data released today by the PBoC, aggregate financing in China was up RMB 3.6 trillion in August, more than twice the RMB 1.7 trillion in July and roughly 40% above consensus expectations. The stock of debt...
2/5
grew 13.3% year-on-year, versus 12.9% a month ago. This is a big number, bringing year-to-date aggregate financing up by RMB 26.0 billion, for a nominal 10.4% growth since January.

The first eight months of 2019 accounted for 60% of the total increase. If the same...
3/5
proportion holds this year, growth in aggregate financing this year will be 14.6%. If, instead, the total amount of additional debt in the last four months of 2020 is the same nominally as in the last four months of 2019, the growth in aggregate financing this...
4/5
year will be 13.1%.

The actual number will probably turn out to be between these two. To put these numbers in context, last year the official debt-to-GDP ratio rose by 6 percentage points. If we assume that nominal GDP will grow by 3.5-4.5% this year, this implies...
5/5
a rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio of 21-27 percentage points.

Put another way, in order to grow GDP nominally by 3.5-4.5%, the Chinese economy will have had to create new debt equal to 33-37 percentage points of GDP in 2020.

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More from @michaelxpettis

13 Sep
1/
They've said this many times before, Noah, but things have been getting consistently worse, not better. The amount of debt it takes to generate a unit of GDP has been growing rapidly, even as GDP growth has slowed, and within Beijing there is a fierce debate about whether...
2/
or not they should take aggressive steps to get debt under control, even if this results in much slower growth and a rise in unemployment. Last year for example there was a big debate over whether to target 6% GDP growth or something much lower. If they did not think the...
3/
debt were a serious problem, and if they believed that Chinese growth was healthy, real and meaningful, why would they even bother having this debate?

The biggest disagreement I have with the Economist, I would say, is over their failure to understand the sources of...
Read 11 tweets
11 Sep
1/4

Much of what this article calls yuan strength was actually dollar weakness – on a trade-weighted basis the yuan has been pretty flat – but I would add two points.

First, with very large inflows on the trade account, the irony is...

scmp.com/economy/china-… via @scmpnews
2/4
that Beijing might indeed be intervening again, although indirectly, to keep the currency from appreciating.

Second, the PBoC has long known that while a weak currency may be good for exports, it weakens domestic demand by effectively reducing the household share of...
3/4
GDP, which is why all the claims in the past 5-6 years that Beijing would respond to slower growth with a large depreciation never made sense to me.

This is where the contradiction in the dual currency model becomes obvious. International circulation benefits from...
Read 4 tweets
9 Sep
1/6
The latest China Perspectives Dashboard from Fitch has just been released. Among other things it says that roughly RMB 3 trillion in Special Bonds have been issued so far this year: “Our analysis suggests the largest category corresponds to funds raised for infrastructure...
2/6
projects, which have more than tripled from the same period in 2019, accounting for almost one-third of Special Bonds issued this year."

RMB 3 trillion is 80% of the RMB 3.75 trillion quota for this year, with the latter equal to about 3.7% of GDP, and 75% greater than...
3/6
last year's issuance.

Fitch believes that about 7% of the roughly RMB 1 trillion that went into infrastructure was invested in "new infrastructure" – telecom and high tech (see below) – which many analysts have argued represents a shift from the...
news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-0…
Read 6 tweets
9 Sep
1/5
I was just re-reading Jagdish Bhagwati’s 1998 article "The Capital Myth: The Difference Between Trade in Widgets and Dollars" on why free capital flows are not a corollary of free trade. The limited benefits of a more efficient allocation of...

doi.org/10.7916/D8SJ1W…
2/5
capital are less than the costs of allowing speculative inflows and outflows that can seriously distort currency values, asset prices, lending standards, and interest rates.

Bhagwati points out that while there is plenty of evidence that free trade can create economic...
3/5
benefits, the same argument for free capital flows is wholly ideological, based on no supporting data, and driven mostly by what he calls the Wall Street-Treasury complex. I would add that capital flow imbalances create trade flow imbalances that actually undermine the...
Read 5 tweets
7 Sep
1/
The puzzle continues into its fifth month. In August the dollar weakened again, driving up the value of China’s reserves by $15-20 billion. In addition the country ran a trade surplus of nearly $60 billion, and yet reported reserves rose by...
scmp.com/economy/china-…
2/
only $10.2 billion, which is less than what we might have expected just from the valuation changes, and means that other net outflows exceeded the trade surplus.

Where did these outflows go and in what form? One of my clients told me that foreign bank loans are being...
3/
repaid. They may also be partly reflected in a slightly smaller EU surplus, but it seems to me that the main offset for the surging Chinese surplus is the US deficit, as @Brad_Setser argues in one of his tweets (and from which I stole this graph). China many be recycling...
Read 5 tweets
5 Sep
1/5
Here we go again. I am not sure how credible a source Global Times is, but for Beijing selling US Treasuries isn’t the hard part. The hard part is what the PBoC does with the proceeds.

-If they buy other USD assets, then nothing has changed.

scmp.com/economy/china-…
2/5
-If they buy euro, yen, sterling, etc., they will unleash anger from these countries who will suffer disinflationary pressures as their currencies rise against the dollar, and who will have to absorb the consequent reduction in the US current account deficit.
3/5
-If they buy the currencies of developing countries, they take highly pro-cyclical credit risks that they have been actively trying to reduce.

-If they stockpile commodities, given how important Chinese growth is for commodity prices, they lock in a huge amount of...
Read 5 tweets

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