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China's Not Rebalancing

The danger of believing Beijing's official numbers...

WHILE WE must be careful not to be trampled in such a bullish stampede as we see right now by standing too incautiously in its path, writes Sean Corrigan for the Cobden Centre, there are both flaws to the premises on which such a Blue Sky mentality has been founded and more immediate concerns that the eagerness to believe has become so widespread and the voices of dissent so lacking that everyone is already leaning over the starboard side of what has therefore become an alarmingly heeling ship, one all to ready therefore to be tipped overboard with the first contrary gust of wind.

Take China. Still in a policy hiatus due to the regime change and about to enter the macroeconomic purdah of the Lunar New Year, that has not precluded the Herd from wilfully taking as bullish a view as possible about likely developments there – even to the point that one senior analyst from a major bank could bring himself to tell his audience at a mining conference that to him the outlook for the commodity market was very much like it was in 2002 (from which secondary low, the reader might recall, it embarked on what some measures show was the best nine years in its history!) 

It seems that nothing will stop the idiot savants – as well as the consciously misleading – from plugging whatever numbers the state propaganda machine churns out straight into their 'models' in order to lend some spurious gloss of calculation to such pronouncements, no matter how unreliable, contradictory, or plain incredible these may be.

Take the Chinese GDP number for the broadest of these: Officially, last year's nominal total came to CNY51.9 trillion, an increase of 9.8% or CNY4.6 trillion on 2011's count. Yet, by adding up the individual data produced separately by the nation's constituent 31 provinces and autonomous regions, we can calculate that the annual sum reached to CNY57.7 trillion (11% higher), and that growth accelerated to 11.1% year-on-year, representing an increment of CNY5.8 trillion which was a quarter larger than that given by the official tally. Spreadsheets, anyone?

By now it has become almost trite to compare the electricity stats with those for GDP or industrial production, yet we have a rather worrying disconnect in other areas of energy use, too. Industry up by a double-digit amount alongside a gain in refined oil product use of no more than half of that (5.2% yoy), of which diesel consumption barely ahead at 1.5%? Makes perfect sense to me!

Then we have the miraculous rebound in 'profits' posted in December (and we will risk a roll of the eyes by asking, once again, how can businesses even begin to compute earnings on a monthly basis?). Setting the seal on QIV's auspicious rebound and so helping the Shanghai Composite to a further 8% gain, December's winnings were supposedly a cool 68% greater than the average of the previous three months; revenues were no less than 13% higher and, hence, margins were reported to have jumped by half from 6.5% to 9.7%. Oh, for such levels of operational gearing in an expanding market! 

In the short run, what may come to haunt the China bulls is the fact that even this brief relaxation of policy has unleashed the same old dark forces of shopping basket inflation and property speculation. For example, the all-important pork price has risen by more than 10% in the past two month, prompting a release of supplies from the central reserve to try to quell the surge.

More worrying still – especially given the news that the much-bruited property tax will not now be rolled out across the country – land sales in China's ten main cities were up by a factor of 3.6 last month from January 2012, according to the Shanghai E-house Real Estate Research Institute. Given that the area sold increased 'only' 77%, this also implies that the average price paid more than doubled. Stop-Go rules OK!

In light of this what would have been merely risible if it did not simultaneously display China's increasingly belligerent response to foreign criticism alongside an utter lack of economic understanding, the mouthpiece People's Daily this week carried an aggressive repudiation of assertions that the country's monetary incontinence posed a threat to global stability.

Putting the cart firmly before the horse, the editorial argued that if a company had made a hypothetical land purchase ten years ago and if, ongoing public this year, that same land had been valued higher by a factor of 2,000 (sic!), if the central bank did not issue new money to the tune of around a quarter of that latest appraisal, the increase would be 'just a bubble'!

No, really! We are not making this up as you can see here.

On top of this, the writer contended, 'price reforms can also lead to a substantial increase in the demand for money' since, he went on, if prices rise, both companies and consumers have to pay more, ergo more money is patently needed – a problem which is moreover said to be 'unique to China'! Truly, to invert Milton Friedman, monetary inflation is everywhere a real side problem!

Heaping a cloud-capped Pelion of further confusion upon this already lofty Ossa of muddle-headedness, a separate justification for the deluge is apparently that while America's attempts of the last four years at disaster recovery have naturally focused on its predominant, highly-leveraged financial sector – meaning that every new, FRB-printed Dollar could be multiplied up sixty times (sic) – poor, old, metal-bashing China, by contrast, has been doomed to rely on a mere 4:1 multiplier to assist its key industrial base (the limitation being imposed lest it blew its companies' balance sheets up to imprudent levels of gearing) and hence it had to keep its central bank's printing presses fifteen times as busy as those of the Fed!

Working up a full head of steam, the author closed this truly Swiftian self-parody with one last, glorious volley of logical howlers, by asserting that the crisis-averting increase in money supply has increased the risk (but only the risk, you will note) of debt expansion before the authorities became 'scared' enough to tighten policy and thus to usher in a 'slump in domestic stock markets, a surge in loan demand, persistently high interest rates, and such financial risks as usurious loans, shadow banking, and trust loan expansion.'

Well, yes, but surely those were merely the unfortunate side effects of an attempt to address the dangerously building excess before the system exploded under its own pressure? No, this hero of socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics confidently concludes, '…the greater risk lies in an increasingly weak real economy.' 

And this is the spokesman for a preternaturally-gifted ruling elite which is supposed to be reforming and rebalancing its economy in a 'scientific' manner and whose rarefied heights of dispassionate calculation we benighted Westerners cannot ever hope to match? Heaven help us all!

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Stalwart economist of the anti-government Austrian school, Sean Corrigan has been thumbing his nose at the crowd ever since he sold Sterling for a profit as the ERM collapsed in autumn 1992. Former City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning, a frequent contributor to the widely-respected Ludwig von Mises and Cobden Centre websites, and a regular guest on CNBC, Mr.Corrigan is a consultant at Hinde Capital, writing their Macro Letter.

See the full archive of Sean Corrigan articles.
 

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