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Mike Bird Profile picture
Mike Bird
@Birdyword
Wall Street editor @TheEconomist. Money Talks pod co-host, Buttonwood column co-author. Just a lad from Leeds with a lust for markets, economics and history.
4 subscribers
Sep 17 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
There *finally* seems some good data on a crucial phenomenon that I've hoped to find for years, on Chinese home ownership. The fact that China has an extremely high official home ownership rates (north of 90%) is a source of a lot of interest and confusion That always seemed to clash with the clear fact that Chinese housing in big, productive cities is astoundingly expensive to buy (20-40x price-to-income ratios, twice or more the level in the West's expensive cities) Image
Sep 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Useful chart from @andrewbatson here covering one of the most under-discussed and useful macro metrics around. China's capital productivity has been in consistent, marked decline even as panic over Chinese industrial prowess has reached fever pitch Image Image
Jul 31 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Brilliant piece in the Britain section this week by @ArchieHall, which engages with one of the most important questions in the UK right now - why are electricity prices so ruinously high? Image
Image The piece highlights the uncomfortable reality that green subsidies and network costs make up 2/3rds of the rise in bills.

And unlike sunny countries that benefit from collapsing solar panel costs, UK renewable energy relies on offshore wind which is no longer getting cheaper. Image
Image
Feb 20 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This week, I wrote about the worrying rise in American credit card delinquences, now at a 13yr high.

You may have encountered Caleb Hammer, who tears into heavily indebted guests on his YouTube show. Well, we live in the Caleb Hammer economy now. Image
Image The delelinquencies are notably concentrated, by age and location: young people are more likely to become delinquent, and the gap between delinquencies in the poorest 10% of zipcodes and the richest 10% of zipcodes is the highest its been in at least 25yrs.
May 2, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Amidst all the yen intervention chat, here's something interesting (if a bit hazy so far) - Japan's LDP is talking about the prospect of tax cuts for corporates to bring their huge overseas cash holdings home. reuters.com/markets/curren… I think the international perception is that Japan is still an export-oriented nation with a trade surplus, driving a current account surplus. But that's now way out of date - the trade surplus is not very reliable at all any more, and the CA surplus is driven by primary income. Image
Dec 31, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
One thing that I reflect on when I come back and forth between the UK and Singapore is the differences in the national psyches. When it comes to policy/national success I think the UK and Singapore must have some of the most diametrically opposed approaches in the world. When I speak to people in the UK about the SG approach in a given area (whether health, education, tax, housing, crime) the thing that I think is often missed by Brits is that SG has a neurotic/paranoid governing style. This is sometimes a point of pride. businesstimes.com.sg/international/…
Jan 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The most important part of this isn't that it's happening, which has been the presumption for decades, but that it's happening a decade earlier than fairly recent projections suggested. asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Soci… In *2019* the population peak was expected in 2029. bbc.com/news/world-asi…
Aug 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Been thinking about this - the charitable interpretation of the 'blob' is that the institutions listed here are mostly staffed by university-educated under-50s in urban areas, a group among which Conservative voters are heading towards being a rounding error. Those organisations and the people staffing them would be heroes of impartiality, beyond what I think it's plausible to ask of them, not to display somewhat more hostility, or even just scepticism/distaste for Tory ideas/policies etc. In that sense the blob is surely real.
Mar 13, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I understand why people see these sort of sanctions and it makes them think the USD will lose some of its stature, but I think that's mostly a misunderstanding of how currencies work in finance and trade. The crucial question: what else are you going to hold, and transact in? The USD is the preeminent currency in trade + finance b/c the US has an open capital account, a wide range of high-quality financial assets, its govt bonds are rate products, and it has a very large domestic economy and a powerful military. Who can say the same?
Sep 10, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I've said it before and I'll say it every day over and over again - it's sort of crazy that the big risk to Chinese property markets is just playing out precisely as a sceptic would have suggested a few years ago and the level of international interest is so low. Nice chart here from Capital Economics on Evergrande specifically - the risk that unbuilt Chinese property starts trading like wildcat bank-issued dollars is not one that I think anyone in the government wants.
Sep 7, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Bye Image I'd you like quarantineposting you're in for a treat
Sep 5, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The companies make a lot more money than they used to. Like, a lot more!
May 23, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I had the scoop on this at the time. I sort of thought it didn't need writing up, because I heard the government's chief scientific adviser say it explictly, on the public broadcaster's flagship radio news programme. You really need the ability to read between the lines with a forensic eye but when Vallance said "we want people to catch it" I took it to be the government's view that they wanted people to catch it.
May 22, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Still doesn't seem to have landed in news discourse very firmly, but China is now vaccinating basically as fast as the US did at the very peak of its vaccination program. Image 17 million doses on Thursday.
May 14, 2021 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Thought I'd pull together some of the research on the economic consequences of China's housing boom.

This has really boomed as an area of investigation in the last few years, and these are papers I've read and returned to. Will continue adding. Yu Shi (2018): Talent misallocation towards real estate has reduced annual manufacturing TFP growth by 0.5 percentage points. imf.org/en/Publication…
Dec 10, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I don't think it's caught a lot of attention outside of the region, but the collapse of Chinese apartment rental platform/provider Danke hits some of the real weak points in China's real estate and finance nexus caixinglobal.com/2020-12-07/cov… The model: Danke rents flats from owners on long-term leases, renovates them, sublets them at greater price. But a lot of renters were taking loans from Danke's partner banks - by 2019, 91% of the tenants were paying via rental loans, mostly from its partner WeBank.
Oct 31, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
ImageImageImage Feels increasingly like we're going to memory hole the fact that year's biggest purveyors of misinformation, by like 800 country miles, were the public health authorities of almost every Western country during the opening stages of a pandemic.
Oct 28, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Overwhelming focus on opening things up, when the summer lull in cases was broadly similar to peak levels seen in Asian success stories. Obsession with keeping travel going, no central quarantine, failure to learn much from places with successful tracing systems. Europe is massively disadvantaged in the same way that the U.S. is, by a lot of physical economic networks crossing varied public health jurisdictions, but yeah they messed it up good and proper on top of that too.