Separately, McDonald’s is selling $29mn RMB denominated bonds in Hong Kong. This is the first non-financial foreign entity to try this issuance. Yes, China is sticking to its game plan, that is to promote more usage of the RMB in international trade and in financial products. All these efforts eventually will lead to full convertibility a few years down the road, and challenge the USD’s role as the global reserve currency for real.

Stimulus is prescribed as a panacea for recession. In today’s global economy, it isn’t effective in the best of circumstances and is outright wrong for what ails the West now.

Trade and foreign direct investment total half of global gross domestic product. Multinational corporations drive both. They shop around the world for the lowest-cost production centers and ship goods to wherever the demand is. Demand and supply are dislocated. So when a government introduces stimulus, the initial increase in demand doesn’t necessarily boost local supply. More importantly, if multinationals decide to invest somewhere else, there wouldn’t be an increase in jobs to sustain the growth in demand beyond the stimulus.

Before you scream traitors, please bear in mind it’s only natural that capital seeks growth, real growth that comes from either productivity or population growth. And within the developed economies, both are in short supply. Japan’s stagnation is NOT due to any policy failure or “stimulus not big enough”, but rather because it has seen both peak productivity and declining population.

Just as water flows down, stimulus affects low-cost economies more, wherever it is initiated. As the West pours money into the global economy through large fiscal deficits or central banks expanding balance sheets, the emerging economies are drowning in excess liquidity. Everything is turning red-hot.

These words are so true. I have blogged about wage increases in all kind of places before.

However, he then went on to explain how unemployment will not be able to check this imported inflation, and here’s where I disagree with him. While I do believe in imported inflation for the matured economies, I don’t think the workers in these economies are in a position to bargain for wage increases. Instead, inflation will have a double whammy on the average Joes as their assets prices and wages keep falling while everyday living expenses increase. The only spin you can put on this nightmarish scenario is that being squeezed on both sides, the painful adjustment will be quicker, or as Xie put:

The West must wait for the Wangs and the Gandhis to become rich enough so that they demand Western wages and spend like the Smiths and Gonzalezes.

It is a long and painful process for the West. And there is no way around it.

The workers allege that Lotte, while officially pays them Rmb1,700 a month, deducts many “fees” from their paycheck, resulting in real monthly pay of only Rmb900, which is lower than Beijing’s minimum wage.

The strikes at Honda etc.had received wide publicity and tacit governmental support. Although this newest episode of labor dispute is different in that it happens in the nerve center of China, I expect it to be resolved in favor of the workers, as their quest is inline with the government’s goal of rebalancing the Chinese economy.

Well, real threat seldom comes with such thunder and lightning. It tends to be small and innocent enough, like allowing foreign central banks and overseas lenders to start investing in China’s bond market. From the FT:

The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, said on Tuesday it had launched a pilot project to allow greater foreign access to its largely closed domestic interbank bond market in order to “encourage cross-border Rmb [renminbi] trade settlement” and “broaden investment channels for Rmb to flow back [to China]”.

Getting more countries and companies to use the currency in cross-border trade transactions would reduce China’s exposure to the US dollar, which is used for most Chinese trade.

“This is an integral part of pushing the internationalisation of the Rmb,” said Wang Tao, chief China economist at UBS. “In order to encourage foreign institutions to get involved in Rmb settlement, you need to give them somewhere to invest.”

Most commentators expect that it’ll take 7 years for the RMB to be freely convertible, with the optimists are arguing for 5 years. Either way, it will come, and the dollar’s reign will end.

As to The Economist’s rhetorical question,

China and India were the biggest economies in the world for almost all of the past 2000 years. Why they fell so far behind may be more of a mystery than why they are currently flourishing.

many readers have resorted to a chicken and egg answer: that China and India had the biggest populations. Hello! Doesn’t having a large population in an agrarian economy in and of itself suggests higher productivity (due to whatever reason), and hence more surplus? Chinese population was almost HALVED after the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 220CE. There were numerous accounts of the horrendous famines and population loss in the early 17th century, before the fall of Ming. So it’s in fact large economies that make large populations sustainable, instead of the other way round.

As to China and India’s sudden fall from the first league, the quick and easy answer is colonialism, which I think is wrong again in terms of cause and effect. Colonialism is like germs that populate our living world. It simply invades countries that have been weakened by other reasons. By the 19th century, China was already in her dying throbs. As such, the GDP share seems like a lagging indicator of a nation’s economic wellbeing.

One of the best books that deal with this fascinating topic is The Great Divergence, by Kenneth Promeranz. Mind you, the writing is horrible, but it’s well worth the effort.

China has a prudent down-payment policy, in the range of 20% to 60% (!). As such mortgages are actually prime assets of the banks. The weak link is loans to the property developers. Huaxia Bank, listed in Shanghai and known ninja loan maker, reported a 14.5% increase in bad debts to the developers. Citic Bank’s bad debts to property developers were up 10%. China Minsheng Banking Corp., one of the better managed ones (and perhaps more transparent?), actually surged by 78%!

In terms of bad debts ratios, all banks are still within the comfort zone. But with the tightening policies only kicking in mid-April, one has to wonder whether the bad debts situation will deteriorate, perhaps dramatically, in H2.

Yes, Honda and Foxconn are foreign-owned (btw, the Chinese do not see Taiwanese as foreign), and strikes against them had subtle governmental support. But could there be other reasons behind this difference in tolerance? Things like:

1. The southern manufacturers with “approved” strikes are mainly exporters, while the banks focus on domestic market.
2. Workers at the southern manufacturers are mostly young, unskilled country migrants while the ex-bank employees are middle-aged, effectively unskilled, officially city dwellers.
3. Raising the wages of the unskilled migrants force the exporters to be more competitive while the banks need to reduce their bloated headcounts to be efficient.
4. Raising wages for migrants helps rebalancing the Chinese economy and builds a middle class, while rehiring the ex-bank employees will…hmm…make their lives better.

Whatever you think of firing these middle-aged people with no real marketable skills, the fact remains that there is economic rationale behind stonewalling their efforts and supporting the cause of the migrant strikers. Whether national policy should be determined solely by economic considerations is another issue though.

Due to popular backlashes against runaway housing prices, Chinese government launched a series of cooling measures in April, causing a sharp drop in turnover (Shanghai saw a fall of over 75% in turnover) but the impact on prices has been marginal so far. To date, the developers have refused to cut prices, buttressed by record profits last year. However, the war of attrition is gradually starting to bite, and an association representing the developers has plead with the central government in an open letter to loosen the controls.

Despite repeated government responses of “No”, you can’t blame the public for trusting the developers more, as previous cooling measures all ended in sharp policy reversal in the face of economic slowdown. However, I think the government will hold out for longer this time, at least for one more quarter.

1. Chinese slowdown will not be apparent until end of Q3. There’s still a wee bit of time.
2. Popular discontent with extra-orbital housing prices is threatening the CCP’s legitimacy. Contrary to western conception, even an authoritarian government has to deal with popular opinion if it wants to stay in power.
3. Housing policy is believed to be part of the portfolio of Li Keqiang, slated to the China’s next premier. Failing in a key policy initiative will become a major stumbling block on his personal route to power.

As such, I believe housing policy will remain unchanged (i.e. tight money, anti-speculation) till the end of Q3. Since I expect rapid deterioration of the Chinese economy in Q4, the government might be forced to revert its stance then.

However, the push back from the property lobby is forceful as well, especially now it seems that government is serious and the tightening measures might last a while. An economist from TsingHua University had calculated earlier on that if the tightening measures last for more than a year, more than 45% of Chinese property companies will encounter solvency problem.

A strong and faithful ally to the property lobby is China’s local governments. Yes, China is not all synchronized and monolithic, and there is indeed internal politics. Many ocal governments absolutely live on land sales. Due to the tightening measures, land sales had been way below budget during the first half of the year. In Hangzhou, a prosperous coastal city, the government sold only 22% of land budged for 2010. Shanghai, China’s money center, sold 29% of its annual plan during the same period.

So in order to secure more revenue, the local governments will definitely push for more loosening, especially now that the economy has weakened. One can only hope that the sane mandarins, who have been calling for “tolerance for a new lower growth rate”, will prevail, but somehow I’m not particularly optimistic.

“Policy makers may have more room to sustain growth if needed,” said Sun Chi, a Hong Kong-based economist at Nomura, who previously worked for the U.S. Treasury in Beijing. “The lending quota could be loosened to sustain ongoing investment projects.”

This is largely based on expectation that inflation is peaking and, dare I say it, the economy is weakening.

On the first factor, I think it’s still too early to call inflation peaking. Food has been a major driver behind inflation this year, with no sign of abating so far. And there has been a persistent rumor lately that China has purchased 600k metric tonnes of rice from Vietnam, mind you, the nation imported only 174k metric tonnes in H1/2010. So this could point to a severe shortage of rice in the market. Is this rumor true? I don’t know. But it’s at least credible enough for a Vietnamese minister to come out to assure his people of food security.

Besides persistent worries on inflation, the asset bubble is another cause of concern for China. Considering that the bank regulator has ordered the banks to consolidate off-balance sheet items on Monday and clamp down on their credit card activities today, plus the PBoC has drained an estimated RMB187bn from the banking system with its open market operations in three weeks, the fix is not coming, at least not yet.