1/4

China's CPI inflation was 0.2% for the past 12 months, substantially higher than the -0.5% registered in November but lower than the roughly 2% of the past five years. I believe demand deposits yield 0.35% and 1-year and 2-year deposits yield 1.5%...

xinhuanet.com/english/2021-0…
2/4

and 2.1%, which means that for now households are getting a real return on their savings, but they won't be if CPI prices continue to rise as fast as they have in the past several weeks. The real return on savings matters a lot to the distribution of income and to the...
3/4

share households retain of GDP, which in turn matters to rebalancing.

On the other hand PPI prices are still in year-on-year deflation. PPI prices declined by 0.4% in December, about half of what was expected, compared to a 1.5% decline year on year in November.
4/4

In the past month, however, factory-gate prices actually rose by 1.1%, versus rising by 0.5% in November. With the 1-year loan prime rate at 3.85%, rising PPI prices should make real debt servicing easier for Chinese businesses.

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More from @michaelxpettis

12 Jan
1/9

This is a good paper (and good thread) documenting the strengthening in recent years of creditor rights in sovereign debt. The authors point out, for example, that the share of debt crises involving litigation has increased from about 5% in the 1980s to 30-50% after 2000.
2/9

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? As the authors note, some analysts “expect stronger creditor rights to have a positive market impact, as governments become less likely to over-borrow and default strategically”, while others believe “that creditor rights can become...
3/9

too strong, making sovereign debt ‘excessively hard to restructure’”

There is little evidence of the former, and I would argue strongly for the latter: strengthening creditor rights is usually bad for both the obligor and creditors overall mainly because it can...
Read 9 tweets
12 Jan
1/7

The uselessness of Trump's trade war with China doesn't mean that the US should not act aggressively to address its decades of large trade deficits. It just means that global conditions of negligible transportation costs, zero communication costs...

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
2/7

and frictionless capital flows require a completely different approach to trade than 100-200 years ago.

The first two conditions render bilateral trade relationships almost irrelevant in determining who runs surpluses and who runs deficits, and the third condition...
3/7

means that trade imbalances are driven by capital flow imbalances. While Peter Navarro’s approach would probably have borne results 100 years ago, even by fifty years ago they were already obsolete, and today do little more than temporarily distort production markets...
Read 7 tweets
11 Jan
1/11

An article worth thinking about: “As changes to the world structure accelerate, China’s rule is in sharp contrast with the turmoil in the West,” says Beijing.

I agree, but I draw a different conclusion. The world is certainly currently going...

scmp.com/news/china/pol…
2/11

through "a period of turbulent change", in Beijing’s words, and great structural adjustments, but usually when that happens, what matters in the long run is not how stable a system seems but rather how successfully political, economic and social institutions adjust to...
3/11

the new conditions. In the past these adjustments have almost always been messy, chaotic, and disheartening to most, but ultimately they were necessary even if we were unable to judge them so at the time.

I would argue that the world today is undergoing both a reversal...
Read 11 tweets
9 Jan
1/6

I hope Joe Biden and his administration are serious about this stimulus spending, especially if it is directed to much-needed infrastructure. For those who are worried about where the money needed to fund the spending will "come from", the fact is...

ft.com/content/b69a5d…
2/6

that any investment or disbursement that results in unemployed people having productive jobs is ultimately self-liquidating because the increase in the total value of goods and services produced by the economy will exceed the increase in the debt.

carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…
3/6

There can of course be problems with inefficient spending and "unfair" transfers, but these are really political issues that can be addressed through the tax system, not economic issues. The point is that if there are Americans who want to work but cannot find...
Read 6 tweets
9 Jan
1/10

The latest IMF report on China was released yesterday and provides a lot of good information and intelligent insight on the Chinese economy. The IMF’s measure of China’s adjusted fiscal deficit (including estimated off-budget investment...

imf.org/en/Publication…
2/10

spending) is projected to rise to 18.2% of GDP in 2020 from 12.6% in 2019. The authors correctly note the worrying surge in debt and warn that Beijing must continue to try to contain financial stability risks, but I notice that they are projecting average GDP...
3/10

growth of just over 6% between 2012 and 2025, including a downward revision of their 2021 forecast from 8.2% to 7.9% (which I still think is a little high).

As I’ve long argued, it will be impossible for China both to control the surge in debt and to achieve growth...
Read 10 tweets
7 Jan
1/5

I disagree. I don't think American democracy was trashed. It was certainly bruised, but democracy is a messy process, and it is especially messy during times when political institutions must adjust to great underlying changes. But that is also its great strength: however...
2/5

messily they do so, democracies adjust.

One thing we can say about recent events in Washington is that they should make the urgency of adjustment all the more clear to Republican and Democrat policymakers. The direction should also be pretty clear. Throughout American...
3/5

history a long period of soaring wealth for the elite and economic stagnation for the masses has always led first to deep resentment, and then to political chaos and conflict which at times even seemed a challenge to democracy, but always ended up strengthening it.
Read 5 tweets

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