Tag Archives: Asia Crisis

China Warns of Double-Dip Recession

15 Mar

From The Australian today:

China’s Premier, Wen Jiabao, has warned that the world risks sliding back into recession and says his country faces a difficult year trying to maintain economic growth and spur development.

“The unemployment rate of the world’s main economy is still high, some countries’ debt crises are still deepening, and the world’s commodity prices and exchange rates are not stable, which are most likely to become the cause of any setback in the economic recovery,” Mr Wen said yesterday in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

China’s and Australia’s economies have become more intertwined in recent years: the country is now our largest trading partner with two-way trade surging to $83 billion in the year ending last June 30, and in December it passed Japan as our largest export market.

Any trouble in China’s economy would quickly resonate in Australia.

Perhaps Treasury Secretary Ken Henry might care to revise his recent declaration that the GFC is ‘over’?

Perhaps Henry, along with RBA Governor Glenn Stevens, and all their many mindless cheerleaders in the media, might pause to reconsider their claims that ‘the risk of serious contraction‘ has passed, and that Australia is now set to enjoy a multi-decade China-fueled mining boom?  One that will fix the massive Rudd hole in the Budget, and provide a “period of unprecedented prosperity” for Australia?

Please… inform yourself.  Understand what is really going on in the financial world. Unlike the lazy, short-sighted economic illiterates who are running this country.

Please browse through the posts on this blog, and follow the links that catch your eye.

You will find references and links to literally dozens of articles from around the world.  You will see that international economists, investors, financiers, world leaders, and many others, have been increasingly warning of the many threats to the global economy. And thus, to Australia’s economy too.

Our Australian economic “authorities” are living in La la land.

Only Barnaby is on the ball.

Rudd Labor, Ken Henry, RBA and friends

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China Facing ‘Massive’ Bank Bailouts

14 Mar

From Bloomberg:

China may be forced to bail out banks that made loans for local-government projects under the unprecedented stimulus program unleashed in 2008, according to Citigroup Inc. and Northwestern University’s Victor Shih.

In a “worst-case scenario,” the non-performing loans of local-government investment vehicles could climb to 2.4 trillion yuan ($350 billion) by 2011, Shen Minggao, Citigroup’s Hong Kong-based chief economist for greater China, said yesterday.

“The most likely case is that the Chinese government will engineer a massive financial bailout of the financial sector,” said Shih, a professor who spent months researching borrowing by about 8,000 local government entities.

More on the growing concerns about China’s property bubble and risks to its economy here, and here.

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China’s Banks In Trouble

9 Mar

From Bloomberg:

China plans to nullify all guarantees local governments have provided for loans taken by their financing vehicles as concerns about credit risks on such debt surges.

China’s local governments are raising funds through investment vehicles to circumvent regulations that prevent them from borrowing directly. A crackdown on local-government borrowing, estimated at about 24 trillion yuan ($3.5 trillion) by Northwestern University Professor Victor Shih, could trigger a “gigantic wave” of bad loans as projects are left without funding, Shih said this month.

“Beijing’s fiscal situation probably isn’t as good as it looks at first glance,” said Brian Jackson, an emerging markets strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in Hong Kong. “Perhaps at some stage the central government is going to have to bail out the banks or the regional governments and take it on its own balance sheet.”

Premier Wen Jiabao recently warned of ‘latent risk’ in China’s banking system due to the massive speculative loans taken on by local governments in China.

Warnings of an inevitable crash in China’s real estate market have been growing louder, with former chief economist for the IMF, Ken Rogoff, predicting that China’s property market is in a speculative bubble that will burst ‘within 10 years’, triggering a regional recession.

In Australia, our economic authorities such as RBA Governor Glenn Stevens, and Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, are banking on a China-fueled multi-decade mining boom to carry Australia out of debt.

They both failed to predict the GFC.  It seems they still cannot see, or will not hear, the warning signals today.

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China: ‘Large Financial Crisis’ By 2012

9 Mar

From the Times Online:

Recently there have been even more alarming views on China. Victor Shih, of America’s Northwestern University, looked into 8,000 local governments in China and warned that a wall of “hidden borrowing” could push Chinese government debt to 96 per cent of GDP next year. He feared a “large financial crisis” as a worst case scenario by 2012. Kenneth Rogoff, of Harvard, fears that a Chinese asset bubble, fuelled by the recent surge in debt, could trigger regional recession within a decade.

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China May Let Banks Fail

9 Mar

From Business Insider:

Last spring, in the midst of China’s huge lending boom, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) was reassuring skeptics there was no reason to fear an explosion of bad debt because most loans were going into government-sponsored infrastructure projects and would almost certainly be repaid.  A year later, they’re a lot more worried, and are sending a strong message to lenders that such loans should not be considered risk free.  Even with the guarantees in place, Bloomberg reports that “a few cities and counties may face very large repayment pressure in coming years because of debt ratios [outstanding debt compared to annual revenue] already exceeding 400 percent.”

Whether regulators will really leave banks holding the bag for the loans that have already been made is another matter.  The government has no interest in undermining the balance sheets of the big banks, which it would be forced to bail out in any event.  But I found the Bloomberg article’s allusion the 1998 collapse of Guangdong International Trust & Investment Corp. (GITIC) potentially prophetic.  Besides the “big four” banks, China has literally hundreds of smaller lending institutions, from municipal banks to trust companies to rural credit co-ops.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these institutions, with their close ties to local governments, own a big piece of the loans being called into question.  It’s too early to say, but if GITIC offers any precedent, we could see a handful of less-favored institutions cut loose and allowed to implode.

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Premier Wen: ‘Latent Risk’ In China’s Banks

5 Mar

From Bloomberg:

Premier Wen Jiabao warned of “latent risk” in China’s banks and pledged to crack down on property speculation as the government faces the consequences of flooding the economy with money to drive growth.

“The domestic economy still faces some prominent problems,” Wen, 67, said in a speech in Beijing to the National People’s Congress, similar to the U.S. State of the Union address. He also cited excess capacity in manufacturing and weak support for rural-income growth.

Wen’s comments reinforce concern that loans made in last year’s record 9.59 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) credit boom may go bad. Harvard University Professor Kenneth Rogoff has said growth could slide to 2 percent from Wen’s 8 percent target within a decade as a debt-fueled bubble collapses..

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Digging A Hole For Ourselves

5 Mar

From The Age:

In a series of speeches in recent days, senior economic officials from Reserve governor Glenn Stevens down have spread the same message: the brief interruption of the global financial crisis is over, and Australia has gone back to where it was – into a resources boom so big it will dwarf the booms of the late ’60s and early ’80s.

The Reserve Bank’s best and brightest argue that this will be good for Australia because it will allow us to earn more income now than we would if the minerals stayed in the ground for a few more years.

With the greatest respect, I sharply disagree. I think we need a national debate on whether it really is in our interests to try to sell off our mineral wealth as rapidly as possible, as our economic leaders believe…

We need to think hard about this. The implicit argument from our officials is that we should allow otherwise-viable industries to be put down in the interests of making room for us to extract as many minerals now as possible.

This is wrong: not just because they are picking winners, or just because China, too, has its vulnerabilities and could fall, but because you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

We need to keep a mix of strong, diverse industries to guarantee our future. We need to debate how we do that, and learn from how others do it.

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Rain For Henry, Stevens’ Parade

5 Mar

From Business Spectator:

Today’s commentary is all about lessons learned and not learned in the GFC.

ABARE has rained on the commodity bulls’ parade with forecasts of falling commodity prices in the medium term, and a falling dollar from next year. This is no surprise to this column, which has argued consistently that the prices of the last cycle will not be repeated because that cycle’s global building boom – from Shanghai to Dubai – was a once-in-a-lifetime event, characterised in the worst cases by massive empty buildings. Mine supply has also now caught up.

The commentary then goes on to critique Michael Stutchbury’s recent article regarding the Australian housing bubble:

Heavens to Betsy. This column will simply observe that house prices reached unprecedented multiples of income in the last cycle and are now threatening to go higher still. And even in Stutchbury’s own terms the boom is based upon easy money – this time fiscal – the First Home Buyers’ Grant (FHBG). We might also note that it was coupled with the lowest cost of mortgages in fifty years. Let’s call a spade a spade. The FHBG was, in the long run, a calamitous policy. It has re-inflated the great Australian housing bubble, underpinned it with moral hazard and badly compromised monetary options… A historic opportunity to de-risk the Australian economy was missed.

If we learned anything form the GFC it is not to trust financial advice, and John Durie of The Australian analyses where new regulation to protect small investors is headed. “Myriad studies have revealed that 50 per cent of Australian adults don’t understand what 50 per cent means.

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Japan PM: Nation’s Fiscal State ‘Quite Severe’

5 Mar

From Reuters:

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said on Thursday there is no doubt that the nation’s fiscal state is quite severe.

“There is no doubt that the current situation is quite severe,” Hatoyama said in a parliamentary committee meeting.

Japan is Australia’s second largest trading partner.  In the December 2009 quarter we sold $38.2bn in exports to Japan. China is our largest trading partner – we sold $42.2bn in exports to China in the same quarter.

A further deterioration in Japan’s ‘quite severe’ financial situation, and/or the predicted bursting of the China real estate bubble, would have disastrous impacts on the Australian economy.

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Official: China Bubble ‘Undisputable’

4 Mar

From China Daily:

China’s real estate industry is in an “undisputable” bubble with its skyrocketing property price fermenting an imminent structural inflation that might hijack the country’s booming economy into violent fluctuations, a high-ranking official said on Wednesday’s Beijing News.

“The over-speedy price hike is evident of an undisputable bubble in the property market, which is a major propeller behind the current inflation,” said Yin Zhongqin, deputy chairman of the Financial and Economic Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress.

Famous international financier George Soros has said that he is “very cautious” on China.

Last week, former IMF chief economist Professor Ken Rogoff predicted that the China bubble will bust “within ten years”, sparking a regional recession and hammering commodity exporters.

Despite measures being taken by the Chinese central authorities, leading authorities on Asian economics say that the China real estate bubble cannot be cooled, as it is being driven by trillions of dollars borrowed for speculative, leveraged investments by local municipal governments.

In Australia, our economic authorities are again asleep at the wheel, having confidently predicted a “Golden Age” of “unprecedented prosperity” from a multi-decade mining boom.

Barnaby is right.

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