1/4
The National Bureau of Statistics has just released China’s Q3 data and GDP grew 4.9% year-on-year in 2021 Q3, down sharply from 7.9% and 16.3% in Q2 and Q1. This was a little less than already-weak expectations.

stats.gov.cn/english/
2/4
China's quarter-on-quarter GDP growth rate was 0.2% in Q3, compared to 1.2% in Q2 and 0.2% in Q1. It’s very difficult to get the Y-o-Y growth rates provided by the NBS to reconcile with their Q-o-Q growth rates, but I’d guess...
3/4
that Q4 GDP would have to be 0.6-1.3% higher than Q3 GDP for the full year’s GDP growth rate to hit 8%.

For the first nine months of the year, industrial production was up 11.8% over 2020 and 6.4% a year over 2019.
4/4
Retail sales were up 16.4% over 2020 and 3.9% a year over 2019. Although consumption has partially reversed its disastrous performance last year relative to production, in other words, it is still seriously lagging over a 2-year period.

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More from @michaelxpettis

19 Oct
1/5
Very interesting article about rising opposition – from both homeowners and local officials – to property taxes designed to reduce or eliminate speculation in the property market. This is a point some of us have been making for years:

wsj.com/articles/in-ta… via @WSJ
2/5
Once the systemic imbalances created by institutional distortions are deep enough, any attempt to remove those distortions will be painful and likely to arouse opposition – and the deeper the imbalances, the greater the opposition.
3/5
I would add that those who worry that property taxes could set off a decline in property prices which, in turn, could hurt consumer spending, are right. But this is an insoluble problem. Highly speculative markets don't stabilize – they either rise or fall.
Read 5 tweets
19 Oct
1/7
Many analysts seem to explain slowing growth in China as the consequence of a deterioration in exogenous factors – i.e. the economy had been supported by tailwinds in the past, but as these are replaced by headwinds, inevitably the economy...
wsj.com/articles/china… via @WSJ
2/7
must grow more slowly. These “headwinds” include the resurgence of the pandemic, rising energy prices, debt mismanagement, political shifts in attitudes towards the role of markets, supply-chain bottlenecks, and so on.
3/7
Because most economists think incrementally rather than systemically, and because journalists must come up with new explanations every few weeks, it is probably easier for them to explain China this way, but I think this is a mistaken way to view the Chinese economy.
Read 7 tweets
19 Oct
1/4
Good article: "As a result, Chinese policymakers feel they have a 'window of opportunity' to re-engineer what they see as the Chinese economy’s over-reliance on debt-fuelled property investment to generate growth."

ft.com/content/aafca7…
2/4
Beijing definitely has the chance to suppress the property sector and reduce credit growth this year, and perhaps the beginning of next year. This is mainly because a partial reversal of last year's disastrous contraction in "high-quality" growth will generate...
3/4
enough growth this year to satisfy their political growth needs. But this will only be a one-off event, and even then, the debt-to-GDP ratio is likely to rise by a couple of percentage points this year. If Beijing really wants to "re-engineer" China's over-reliance...
Read 4 tweets
17 Oct
1/11
Kevin Rudd makes some important points in this article, but he also writes: "The implications for the global economy from such a scenario are very real. China represented 28 per cent of all global growth between 2013 and 2018 — twice that of the US.

ft.com/content/d9ce37…
2/11
A significantly slowing Chinese property market would mean slower global growth, with a particular impact on commodities that service construction."
3/11
Rudd may be expressing a confusion — one that many others have too — between China's share of global growth and China's contribution to global growth. It is true that China has accounted for the biggest share of global GDP growth in...
Read 11 tweets
17 Oct
1/6
"It is harder to predict what will happen to home prices in China. If they do decline far or over any length of time, expect to see much bigger problems emerge for banks and for consumers as negative wealth effects spread among the urban population."
theguardian.com/world/2021/oct…
2/6
As @georgemagnus1 suggests in his article, this is probably the biggest problem the Chinese economy faces. The past 1-2- decades have seen the creation of an extraordinary amount of bezzle, i.e. fictional wealth created by...
carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…
3/6
the systematic capitalization of expenses and by the overvaluation of housing, infrastructure and other assets. The total amount is probably comparable only to the amounts created in Japan in the 1980s or the US in the 1920s.
Read 6 tweets
15 Oct
1/4
The PBoC has finally commented directly on Evergrande-related turmoil, criticizing the company for its “poor management”, while playing down the potential spillover effects to the financial system, which they say they can control.
scmp.com/economy/china-… via @scmpnews
2/4
They're probably right, but as I've argued before, domestic financial contagion wasn't the main risk from Evergrande. The regulators have had plenty of practice managing domestic financial contagion before, and as long as the banking system is still...
carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…
3/4
largely closed and the regulators credible, this was never likely to be a problem.

The bigger risk, in my opinion, is the domestic economic contagion through the financial-distress behavior of different sectors of the economy, all seeking to protect themselves...
Read 4 tweets

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