China pide paso...

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

China is having a credit-fuelled non-recovery | FT Alphaville

China is having a credit-fuelled non-recovery
Kate Mackenzie

| Apr 15 13:44 | Comment | Share

It’s nice that China can still surprise us:

A double-digit rise in bank lending and a surge in total credit in the economy in the first three months of the year, together with forecast-busting import growth in March, have set analysts thinking the economy is expanding faster than expected and policymakers may have to act to restrain it. (Reuters, yesterday)

Every strategist around, it seems, was expecting an increase in the YoY quarterly growth rate after the recent credit surge. Of course… it didn’t happen. The Q1 GDP growth figure published today was 7.7 per cent above the same period in 2012, well short (relatively) of the 8 per cent that was expected and lower than the previous quarter’s YoY figure of 7.9 per cent.

Yet much of the reason for those expectations of credit tightening are still there: credit really surged, particularly in March.

Most other China data released today – March numbers for industrial production, fixed-asset investment, electricity output and retail sales — was also an unhappy surprise (numbers can be found here):

Unlike many countries, China does not publish an annualised adjusted quarter-on-quarter GDP figure, but only a year-on-year figure and a seasonally-adjusted quarter-on-quarter figure. We explored this at length last year, and this Q1 growth rate looks worse if given the more standard treatment. The officially-provided, seasonally-adjusted QonQ rate is 1.6 per cent, which annualises to 6.6 per cent.

Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight has charted both rates:

However, that’s perhaps nitpicking; we’re still talking growth rates that would be the envy of the world, et cetera…

We think the biggest question out of today’s GDP number is what it means for China’s increasingly credit-fuelled growth model.

There’s a couple of ways of looking at this.

There’s total credit outstanding to total nominal GDP. In Q4 2012, as calculated by Michael Werner of Bernstein:

However another way of looking at it is to compare the rate of financing flows compared with the rate of GDP growth; that is the growth created by each marginal yuan of credit. On an unadjusted, nominal comparison, GDP for Q1 2013 was about Rmb1.1tn higher than the previous year, while the credit issuance rate increased about Rmb2.27tn year-on-year. So that very rough calculation gives us about a 2x relationship, although it’s not a great description of the situation because it’s comparing gross new issuance with growth.

Bernstein’s Warner calculated the credit multiplier on a rolling basis in January, showing that the credit:growth ratio has plummeted from about 1:1 to 3:1 – that is, about Rmb3 of new credit for every Rmb1 of new growth:

The above chart is based on Bernstein’s own estimate of credit growth, which they call Total Credit Formation, but that metric also likely deteriorated in Q1 as the official measure of credit growth was dramatic this quarter. Below is a chart of Total Social Financing growth; TSF is the government’s measure of credit issuance including some shadow financing:

Again, this is gross new credit, but clearly this latest quarter was something special.

In fact, we can be quite sure the latest quarter of credit growth will have thrown the credit:GDP ratio because of this chart from HSBC’s Fred Neumann, via Beyondbrics:

This chart, unlike the second Bernstein one, does go up to Q1 2013. A key difference is Neumann compares credit issued against total GDP, rather than GDP growth. So where he comes up with a ratio of 1:4.7 in Q4 — that is, Rmb1 of credit issued equalling about Rmb4.7 of GDP — whereas Bernstein’s Werner (and others such as IHS Global Insight’s Thornton) have calculated this as Rmb1 of credit issued to about Rmb0.3 of GDP growth.

To do a very rough extrapolation, that would miccionan the ratio decreased by about 11 per cent.

So, in terms of new credit-to-GDP growth; we’re still in the realm of every Rmb1 in growth requiring about Rmb3 in credit for every Rmb1 of growth; only the ratio is edging further upwards and it’s something like Rmb3.3 for every Rmb1 in growth.

However, there’s always a bullish point to be found in the jovenlandesass of numbers on a big China data release day. Firstly: if the numbers are so fake, why not make them look better?

More seriously: much of the Q1 credit surge was in March and so, perhaps it simply hasn’t kicked in. This is what Societe Generale are suggesting — but even so, they are hardly bullish:

We do not think Q1 marked the end of recovery, as the lagged impact of rapid credit growth in the past few months should kick in later. However, at the same time, the latest data firmly support our call for a weak and short-lived cyclical recovery of the Chinese economy in 2013.

Finally, perhaps we are seeing some evidence of China rebalancing away from its incredibly high level of investment towards a more consumption-based model?

Capital Economics, from whom the chart above comes, are not convinced however. They point out that for the past few years, consumption’s share of growth has jumped in Q1, only to fall back during the rest of the year. The chart shows this trend clearly.

One more big argument for the bearish case: the export component of that Q1 growth is probably overstated; a surge in exports to Hong Kong in recent months, and to a lesser extent to Taiwan, is believed to reflect attempts to get around China’s capital controls, together with a little tax rebate scamming.

Y parece que los gobiernos locales están retrasando el ajuste del ladrillo impuesto por el gobierno central:
China

China’s Cities Drag Feet on Home-Price Curbs: Mortgages
By Bloomberg News - 2013-04-16T07:00:25Z

All real estate markets are local, says the industry axiom, one that China’s central government is painfully aware of as its efforts to rein in home prices are undermined by uncooperative municipal authorities.

Former Premier Wen Jiabao, in his final endeavor to make housing affordable, set an April 1 deadline for higher down payments and interest rates for second-home loans in cities with “excessively fast” price gains and ordered stricter enforcement of taxes on sales. Thirty-five provincial-level cities responded with measures insufficient to curb prices that climbed 150 percent from 2003 to 2012.

“The local governments are just making a gesture to show they are amowing the orders,” said Ding Shuang, a senior China economist with Citigroup Inc. in Hong Kong. “Some of the targets are almost like jokes. The government’s enforcement of policies will be compromised.”

Local officials lack the resolve to cool the market because proceeds from land sales contribute about a quarter of their fiscal income and are needed to fund infrastructure and other spending. Their reluctance to act decisively poses a challenge to Premier Li Keqiang, who replaced Wen on March 15 and inherited rising prices that aggravate social unrest by putting homes out of the reach of many Chinese.

After a brief slowdown in the first half last year, sales jumped 53 percent in March from a year ago, government data released yesterday show. Prices for new homes climbed the most in more than two years from February, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd. (SFUN), owner of the country’s biggest real estate website.

Benign Response

Most cities, including Hangzhou and Nanjing in the east, and the southern business hub of Shenzhen, pegged home-price gains at a rate less than the growth in per-capita disposable incomes. That will allow home prices to increase 7.5 percent to 13 percent this year, Centaline Group, parent of China’s biggest real estate agency, said in a report this month.

Only Shanghai and Beijing, which already has the harshest curbs in the nation, were more stringent. Beijing banned single- person households from buying more than one residence while Shanghai prohibited banks from giving credit to third-home buyers, according to the local administration websites. The two cities will also enforce a 20 percent tax on capital gains from property sales.

The curbs in individual cities are “far more benign than the market’s expectations,” analysts at BNP Paribas SA in Hong Kong, led by Wee Liat Lee, said in an April 2 report.

Rate Cuts

The government started efforts to hold down property prices in April 2010. It has raised down-payment and mortgage requirements, imposed a property tax for the first time in Shanghai and Chongqing and enacted purchase restrictions in about 40 cities, including capping the number of homes people can own and requiring new residents of a city to wait a year or more before buying.

The government’s latest measures are unlikely to cool prices, though sales may slow, Yao Wei, a Societe Generale SA China economist, said in a March 26 report. Expanding the property tax and tightening monetary policy are two other options it may consider, she said.

Home prices resumed climbing in the second half of 2012 after the central bank cut interest rates in June and July to reverse a slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy. They were the first rate cuts in three years. The economy expanded a less-than-expected 7.7 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, figures released yesterday showed.

Property Tax

Imposing a nationwide property tax would be “very effective” in stabilizing the market, though it should be done gradually to avoid a crash, billionaire George Soros said in an interview with the official Xinhua News Agency on April 7.

“Theoretically, everybody knows a property tax is good, but practically it has been opposed by those who already own a lot of homes, including some officials,” said Citigroup’s Ding. “Even if the tax couldn’t be immediately imposed, a timetable will help affect market expectation.”

Prices are at the highest since China privatized home ownership in 1998 as urbanization drove workers into cities, raising incomes and boosting demand. Cooling the property market would weigh on land prices and sales, reducing a key source of income local authorities need to fund infrastructure construction.

Stamp Duty

“Fundamentally, there are problems with local governments’ incentive tendencies,” said Vincent Mo, chairman of SouFun. “They are reluctant to sell land at low prices because they live on land revenues,” restricting supply and making it difficult to bring home prices down.

The growth in revenue from the stamp duty levied on home and land transactions slipped 8.3 percentage points to 3.9 percent last year as sales slowed and developers became less willing to buy land, the finance ministry said in a Jan. 23 statement on its website.

Land sales dropped 13 percent to 1.8 trillion yuan ($290 billion) last year from 2011, according to SouFun, which tracks 300 cities. Land prices dropped 1.2 percent in 2012 from a year earlier to 942 yuan per square meter, SouFun said.

China’s cities, especially smaller ones, got at least 21 percent of their revenue, and in some cases as much as half, from selling land last year, according to Zurich-based UBS AG.

Local municipalities are also using land for financing, according to Credit Suisse Group AG. The municipalities, barred from directly selling bonds or taking out bank loans, have set up more than 6,000 local government financing vehicles, known as LGFVs, to raise funds for projects, the National Audit Office said in a June 2011 report. Such vehicles accounted for 46 percent of local borrowings.

Stricter Regulation

“Due to stricter regulation on financing, these LGFVs are more reliant on land sales (and are using unsold land as collateral to borrow) than before,” Jinsong Du, a property research analyst at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong, said in an April 8 report. “This is probably the main reason for the much milder-than-expected city-level housing measures.”

The expansion in local government revenue this year is projected to slow to 9 percent from 16 percent in 2012, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report March 11. Land-sale income is forecast at 2.74 trillion yuan for this year, equivalent to about 26 percent of regional governments’ fiscal income last year, according to the finance ministry.

Land Grab

“The local governments are actually quite smart,” said Qu Anxin, a Shanghai-based senior manager at Centaline Group. “We’ve seen such situations where local governments will increase land supplies when the market was good and therefore get higher prices at auctions, and they become not so enthusiastic when the market is bad, and they would use land parcels with poorer quality for affordable housing projects as they won’t sell at high prices anyway.”

Local authorities’ thirst for land came to light last year in reports by the national auditor’s office. In an audit of 24 cities and counties’ land management and land-sale funds, seven regions -- including Tianjin, which neighbors Beijing, and Shenyang in northeastern China -- were found to have illegitimately seized 204,100 mu of collectively owned land, mostly from farmers, to skirt caps on the amount of land that can be used for new construction, according to an April 2012 statement on the auditor’s website. Mu is a standard Chinese measure for land that is equivalent to 666.7 square meters or 7,176 square feet.

Confusing Policy

New home prices rose for a 10th month in March, gaining 1.1 percent from February, the biggest advance in 26 months, according to SouFun, as buyers rushed into the market ahead of the property curbs by local governments.

Asking prices of existing homes in the first week of April continued to rise in four of five major Chinese cities that Centaline tracks.

“The new policy not only confused foreign investors, but also confused me,” Wang Shi, chairman of China Vanke Co. (000002), the nation’s biggest developer by sales value, said at a conference in New York on April 6. “They cannot only use temporary controls on prices” and should also limit increases “through market methods,” said Wang. He reiterated that there’s a bubble in the property market, a view he first aired last month in an interview on CBS Corp. (CBS)’s “60 Minutes” news program.

The government will issue more tightening measures if home sales and prices continued to climb in coming months, said Johnson Hu, a Hong Kong-based property analyst at CIMB-GK Securities Research.

Weaker Growth

Still, the nation’s weaker-than-expected first-quarter economic growth is alleviating further tightening concerns, Citigroup analysts Oscar Choi and Marco Sze wrote in a report dated yesterday. The data “points to the government’s dilemma since, if tightening in the property market is too stringent, this would impact growth,” they wrote.

In larger cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, a shortage of land is underpinning price gains. Shanghai sold a 122,018- square-meter plot of land for 3.8 billion yuan on April 10, the highest price this year in the city.

“There’s a lot of land wasted in rural area, but a lack of supply in big cities,” said Ren Zhiqiang, chairman of Huayuan Property Co. (600743), a midsize Beijing developer of commercial and residential properties, on April 8 at the Boao Forum for Asia. “What ultimately pushes home prices to rise unceasingly is such unreasonable land distribution.”

One clear-cut nationwide property policy won’t work in country so big, according to broker Savills Plc. (SVS) Home prices last month in Shanghai hit 28,147 yuan per square meter, the highest among 100 cities SouFun tracks and almost seven times the lowest, in the central city of Xinxiang.

“The main impact of this round of the central government’s policies is to give local governments more independence in deciding how these regulations are implemented in their local markets,” said James Macdonald, head of China research at Savills in Shanghai. “With that greater power, they are also going to have greater accountability.”

 

[Vytautas]

china....

El fin de la clase media. MASSIMO GAGG y EDOARDO NARDUZZI

 

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

China local authority debt ‘out of control’ - FT.com

Vice Chairman of Chinese Accounting Association Warns Chinese Local Debt Could Create Bigger Crisis than US Housing Implosion « naked capitalism

Vice Chairman of Chinese Accounting Association Warns Chinese Local Debt Could Create Bigger Crisis than US Housing Implosion

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

On the one hand, Bloomberg today tells us retail demand for stocks is as hot as ever:

“Over the last few weeks, every down move has been met with buyers that have come in,” Brad Sorensen, director of market and sector analysis at San Francisco-based Charles Schwab Corp., said by telephone. His firm has $2.08 trillion in client assets. “People on the sidelines are waiting for a pullback to get into the market that they’ve missed for the past six months. We’re seeing more of that today.”

On the other, we have someone well-placed in China telling the world that its local debt is a train wreck waiting to happen, a classic Minksy Ponzi unit, but the timing of the unraveling is uncertain. And the source is an authority and not the sort one would expect to make remarks like that casually.

The Financial Times tells us the alert comes from Zhang Ke, vice chairman of the Chinese accounting association, who said his accounting firm, ShineWing, had virtually stopped signing the financial statements for bond sales by local governments. He described the debt as “out of control” with the potential to cause a bigger-than-housing-crisis level bust. But since the obligations can still be rolled, who knows when the dubious debt will fall under its own weight. As the article explains:

Local government debts soared after 2008, when Beijing loosened borrowing constraints to soften the impact of the global financial crisis. Provinces, cities, counties and villages across China are now estimated to owe between Rmb10tn and Rmb20tn ($1.6tn and $3.2tn), equivalent to 20-40 per cent of the size of the economy.

Last week, Fitch cut China’s sovereign credit rating, in the first such move by an international agency since 1999. On Tuesday, Moody’s cut its outlook for China’s rating from positive to stable.

Local governments are prohibited from directly raising debt, so they have used special purpose vehicles to circumvent these rules, issuing bonds under the vehicles’ names to fund infrastructure projects.

Investment companies owned by local governments sold Rmb283bn of bonds in the first quarter of 2013, more than double the total for the same period last year. Such an increase would normally be expected to boost the economy, but China’s growth unexpectedly slowed to 7.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2013.

Mr Zhang said many local governments had invested in projects from public squares to road repairs that were generating lacklustre returns, and so were relying on financing rollovers to pay back their creditors. “The only thing you can do is issue new debt to repay the old,” he said. “But there will be some day down the line when this can’t go on.”

Zhang pooh-poohed the value of perceived guarantee by provinces and local authorities and says his firm will sign off on deals only when they see sufficient cash flow.

Now as the FT points out, ShineWing has a competitive axe to grind, since it is trying to break into the big leagues of international accounting firms. But this could also be self preservation. Do you think in a wealth-destroying local government bust that the national government would behave charitably towards the enablers, particularly since it has been trying to rein local borrowing in?

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, MacroBusiness has a new exclusive from Michael Pettis on the local debt issue which casts more light on this issue.

[Saul] Eslake has argued as late as last September that he expected China to continue growing strongly over the next few years, and further claimed, in a 2011 report, that Chinese demand for hard commodities will rise quickly for at least another eight years and probably a lot longer:

But I believe that, even on quite conservative assumptions (which entail some slowing from the growth rates it has recorded over the past two decades), China’s demand for commodities will continue to grow strongly until at least 2019, and may not start to fall away until 2024; while in India, where the commodity-intensive stage of economic development only began in earnest in 2007, it is likely to continue well into the 2030s.

…Eslake says that while the full extent of China’s debt is unclear, much of it is owed by one part of the government to another. “There is the potential for writing off unsustainable obligations that doesn’t necessarily exist in other situations,” Eslake said. “I’m not disputing there are problems there and there is an opaqueness about the size, breadth of the debt problem, but it doesn’t automatically amow that China is facing its own Lehman Brothers moment.”

I am not sure what Eslake means by claiming that much of the debt “is owed by one part of the government to another”, but to the extent that this statement is correct it is pretty meaningless and to the extent that it means anything at all it is simply wrong. Although there are a number of intermediaries in the debt process in China, some of whom are indeed government entities, broadly speaking Chinese debt is owed by a group of borrowers that consists mainly of local and provincial governments and their financing vehicles, state-owned enterprises, real estate developers, large manufacturers, and other government related entities (the PBoC, the MoF, the various development banks, etc.).

These debts are owed mainly to Chinese households, either indirectly in the form of bank deposits and wealth management products intermediated by the banks, or, to a lesser extent, directly in the form of mutual funds, insurance companies, pension funds, and so on. To the extent that there is intergovernmental debt, this mainly occurs as agencies intermediate depositors and the ultimate borrowers.

…When solvency is the problem, implicit losses have to be resolved one way or another, and the costs must ultimately be assigned to some sector of the economy. Insolvency is a risk whenever the economic benefits created by an investment are less than the economic costs associated with the investment. In that case the investment makes a country poorer, but failure to recognize bad debt allows the county to feel richer when the investment is made. How the investment is financed can affect the stability and liquidity of the borrowing entity, but it cannot create or eliminate the original loss.

…Who pays for the transfer? In the past in China – and usually in every case in the world – the loss is paid for by the household sector, either in the form of busted deposits, taxes, or ****** transfers, of which the financial repression tax usually is the most important. China’s last banking crisis was paid in this way. Fifteen years ago China’s banking system was insolvent, with estimates that up to 40% of total loans were effectively non-performing had they been correctly identified.

The banking system was cleaned up over the next decade partly by implicitly granting massive debt forgiveness to borrowers in the form of extremely low interest rates (perhaps negative in real terms for most of the past fifteen years), which allowed the borrowers to “grow out” of their debt burden, and partly by the very wide spread mandated by the PBoC between the minimum lending rate and the maximum deposit rate, which guaranteed banks a huge profit. After 10-15 years of this, China’s domestically financed bad debt seemed miraculously to resolve itself.

But there was no miracle, and I think this what confuses Eslake and others like him who did not understand how the bad debt was actually resolved. There was simply an annual – if ****** – transfer of resources equal, according to my back of the envelope calculation, to between 5% and 8% of GDP from households to banks and borrowers. Did this have an economic impact? Of course it did.

Hilos al respecto:
http://www.burbuja.info/inmobiliari...hina-local-authority-debt-out-of-control.html
http://www.burbuja.info/inmobiliari...14370-rumores-deuda-oculta-china-colosal.html

 

[kemao2]

Parece que el cambio de politica monetaria en Japon y la guerra de divisas está haciendo daño en China que están tomando su propia medicina. EL comercio con Japon ya no va tan bien


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China Exports Miss Forecasts as ‘Absurd’ Data Probed



China’s exports rose less than forecast for the first time in four months, fueling concerns about the outlook for trade as the government said it’s investigating reports of inflated figures.

Shipments abroad increased 10 percent in March from a year earlier, the customs administration said today in Beijing, while imports rose by an above-forecast 14.1 percent, leaving an unexpected trade deficit of $880 million. An “astounding” 92.9 percent jump in exports to Hong Kong, the most in 18 years, raises questions on data quality, researcher IHS Inc. said.
Enlarge image China Export Gains Miss Forecasts for First Time in Four Months

A China Shipping Container Lines Co. container ship enters the Port of Long Beach in Long Beach, California. “China’s export growth is expected to decelerate further in the second quarter as demand in the U.S. and Europe remains weak,” said Li Wei.

The customs agency acknowledged concerns that the data may be overstated at a press briefing today while standing by its figures and saying the Hong Kong gains stem from different statistical methods. Sales to the U.S. and Europe both fell for the first time since November, leaving the world’s second- largest economy with weaker global demand to support a recovery.

“This 10 percent export growth is more real as it’s in line with other data” including power consumption, industrial production and transportation, Lu Ting, chief Greater China economist at Bank of America Corp. in Hong Kong, said in a note today. January and February’s “abnormally strong” gains were probably distorted by companies’ inflated reports, Lu said.

BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), the world’s biggest mining company, sees China growth “trending down” toward 6 percent after about 7 percent to 8 percent in the next couple of years, Chief Financial Officer Graham Kerr said today at the Bloomberg Economic Summit in Sydney, indicating prospects in its largest customer present its main risk.
Raw Materials

Import gains stemmed from rising demand for raw materials, implying fixed-asset investment growth will be “robust” in coming months, Lu said. Imports from the U.S. rose 30.3 percent from a year earlier, while shipments from Australia increased 18.4 percent.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index (SHCOMP) of stocks was little changed at the close. It’s down 1.9 percent this year.

The export gains for March compare with 21.8 percent growth in February and the 11.7 percent median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of 36 economists.

Exports fell to major partners in March including the U.S., European Union, Japan, South Korea and Canada, the customs administration said today. The main exception was shipments to Hong Kong, which rose to $48.4 billion, accounting for 27 percent of total exports. Sales to Taiwan rose 44.9 percent, while Taiwan this week reported a 1.2 percent decline in imports from China.
Anecdotal Evidence

“The breakdown of exports by destination veers towards the absurd,” IHS economists Xianfang Ren and Alistair Thornton said in a note today. “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that exporters are faking orders” and using a practice to obtain export-tax rebates, IHS said.

Zheng Yuesheng, a customs administration spokesman, said today that the practice of false trade declarations “does exist, but is definitely not mainstream.” Exporters must bear legal responsibilities if they do that, Zheng said.

The agency has made an initial probe into possible money flows disguised as trade with Hong Kong, and will “work with relevant departments to conduct deeper and more detailed investigations and research so that we can be completely clear about various reasons behind the extraordinary trade growth with Hong Kong,” Zheng said at the briefing in Beijing.

At the same time, Zheng reiterated the agency’s stance that every dollar of trade is documented by declaration forms. He said that a difference in statistical methods is the major reason for the discrepancy between bilateral figures reported by China and Hong Kong. One example is that some mobile-phone products are assembled in China then shipped to Hong Kong before re-entering the mainland for sale, which pushes up exports to Hong Kong, Zheng said.
Recovery Signs

China has yet to see firm evidence of a stable recovery in external demand, Zheng said.

Separately, China’s central bank and financial institutions bought a net 295.4 billion yuan ($47.7 billion) of foreign currency in February, People’s Bank of China data showed today, the second-biggest monthly gain since August 2011. Buying may reflect inflows of funds into China.

Estimates for export growth last month ranged from 5 percent to 18 percent. Economists projected import gains of 6 percent, based on the median forecast of 35 respondents, while the median estimate for a trade surplus was $15.15 billion.

The trade deficit was the first for a month not affected by the Lunar New Year holiday since March 2010. The shortfall “may send a strong signal” that strength in the yuan “can no longer be tolerated,” said Liu Li-Gang, chief Greater China economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd.
Reference Rate

The central bank today set the yuan reference rate at 6.2548 per dollar, the strongest level since a peg ended in July 2005.

Gains in overseas shipments exceeded forecasts by at least 7.5 percentage points in December, January and February, the first time that’s happened in three straight months in the eight years Bloomberg has compiled analyst estimates for the data.

The government last month set a target of 8 percent trade growth this year, down from 10 percent in 2012. Zheng said today that he’s confident China can achieve the 2013 goal.

A weakening yen may also pose challenges for China’s exports, complicating the nation’s monetary policy, billionaire investor George Soros said this week at the Boao Forum for Asia in China. Japan’s currency has fallen about 22 percent against the yuan in the past six months as new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe steps up efforts to beat deflation.
Japan Sales

“A depreciating yen has weakened the competitiveness of Chinese products in Japan,” Zheng of the customs agency said. Sales of labor-intensive products to Japan have already been affected as Chinese textile exports to the nation fell 3.9 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, he said.

China Cosco Holdings Co. (1919), the nation’s biggest shipping company, on March 27 reported a wider-than-expected annual loss of 9.56 billion yuan ($1.54 billion) as dry-bulk rates slumped.

China’s economic expansion may have accelerated for a second period to 8 percent in the first quarter, according to the median estimate of analysts. The Asian Development Bank yesterday projected growth will pick up to 8.2 percent this year from 7.8 percent in 2012.

Elsewhere today in the Asia-Pacific region, an index of Australian consumer confidence fell 5.1 percent for April while South Korea reported a lower-than-estimated jobless rate of 3.2 percent for March.

The U.S. will see a report on mortgage applications after an index fell 4 percent in the week ending March 29 from a week earlier.

China Exports Miss Forecasts as

 

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

El PMI de manufacturas chino de HSBC baja a 50.5 :
China

China’s Recovery Falters as Manufacturing Growth Cools
By Bloomberg News - 2013-04-23T03 :28 :57Z

China’s manufacturing is expanding at a slower pace this month on weakness in global and domestic demand, fueling concern that the world’s second-biggest economy is faltering.

The preliminary reading of 50.5 for a Purchasing Managers’ Index (EC11CHPM) released by HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics compared with a final 51.6 for March. The number was also below the median 51.5 estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of 11 analysts. A reading above 50 indicates expansion.

China’s stocks slumped as the data provided further evidence of an economic slowdown, after weaker-than-estimated numbers for gross domestic product last week prompted banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to cut full-year forecasts. In Washington, central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said April 20 that a 7.7 percent first-quarter expansion was reasonable and “normal,” highlighting reduced expectations after 10 percent-plus rates during the past decade.

“This paints a picture of a continued painfully slow recovery for China’s manufacturing sector,” said Yao Wei, a Societe Generale SA economist based in Hong Kong. “The government needs to help translate the easy liquidity conditions into real growth.”

President Xi Jinping’s officials are grappling with constraints on export demand, property-market overheating, the risks associated with a surge in so-called shadow banking, and weakness in consumption because of a campaign to rein in official perks such as spending on banquets.

The Shanghai Composite Index fell 2 percent as of 11:24 a.m. local time.

France, Germany

Further readings on the strength of the global economy will come today from manufacturing and services PMIs for France, Germany and the euro-area. In the U.S., the Commerce Department is forecast to report new home sales improved in March, a Bloomberg News survey of economists showed.

In China, first-quarter growth slipped from a 7.9 percent annual pace in the final three months of last year, with bird flu in Shanghai and Zhejiang and an earthquake in Sichuan now adding to the challenges for officials.

“This has been a very narrowly based recovery, predominantly driven by infrastructure investment, but now even infrastructure investment is also apparently slowing down,” said Tao Dong, head of Asia economics excluding Japan at Credit Suisse Group AG in Hong Kong.

Cutting Forecasts

Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. last week cut estimates for 2013 expansion to 7.8 percent. That would be the same as 2012’s pace, which was the weakest in 13 years.

Today’s data show that weakness in demand, including for exports, is starting to weigh on employment in manufacturing, HSBC said in a statement. The preliminary report is based on 85 percent to 90 percent of responses to a monthly survey of purchasing executives at more than 420 companies.

“Beijing is expected to respond strongly to sustain the economic recovery by increasing efforts to boost domestic investment and consumption in the coming months,” said Qu Hongbin, chief China economist with HSBC in Hong Kong.

Investors are assessing where the nation’s growth rate may settle as the working-age population declines, labor costs and incomes rise and officials wrestle with the environmental toll from polluting factories. The answer may be determined partly by the speed of efforts to tackle state monopolies and open the economy to more market forces.

“China’s undergoing economic restructuring, which sometimes is not in lockstep with growth,” Zhou said in an interview on April 20. “We need to sacrifice short-term growth for the purposes of reforms and structural adjustments.”

 

[vil.]

Parece que el cambio de politica monetaria en Japon y la guerra de divisas está haciendo daño en China que están tomando su propia medicina. EL comercio con Japon ya no va tan bien


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China Exports Miss Forecasts as

Participo poco ultimamente, sólo ante eventos que merecen la pena...

Este es uno de ellos y es MUY ESPECIAL....

Hace unos añitos ya y en este foro predije que Japón y China tienen una cita al sol pendiente...

Este articulo es el pistoletazo de salida a lo inevitable...

ANOTENLO BIEN.... LEANLO BIEN...


Japón ha lanzado una bomba de superficie muy potente con su expansión monetaria, que por otro lado era inevitable dada la insana manipulación monetaria y laboral que ejerció China durante estos últimos años... ahora con China atada al dolar por decisión real de su auténtico amo, es decir el Tio Sam, Japón ha tomado el camino más lógico, devolverle la moneda.... China por su parte, como ya hiciera España o EE.UU. o Inglaterra se lanzó a una burbuja inmobiliaria para mitigar su particular via crucis interno... hoy... hoy... los datos del artículo vienen a poner la realidad muy cruda para China....

MANIPULACIÓN de datos... ¿dónde se dió esto hasta la saciedad?....

Pero el problema será cuando esos datos no tapen la realidad social interna, en esos instantes... CAPUT...

Por ahora, China vive aposentada en una burbuja irreal, donde el ciudadano percibe una riqueza que no es tal, mientras los fundamentos reales de esa riqueza no existen... lo mismo que España, por poner un caso conocido y vivido...

El dato más importante es el que saca Soros, la moneda japonesa se ha deslizado un 22%... China tendrá que hacer frente a eso, ¿cómo?... ESA ES LA CUESTIÓN... ¿se querrá enfrentar al amo o preferirá al vecino?...

¿Apostamos?...

---------- Post added 23-abr-2013 at 11:48 ----------

El PMI de manufacturas chino de HSBC baja a 50.5 :
China

Por cierto, no dejen de mirar este artículo... tiene frases y reseñas que suenan conocidos...

Un cierto tufillo a... a... a... AUSTERIDAD... ¿no les suena?... miren esta frasecita:

"...Zhou said in an interview on April 20. “We need to sacrifice short-term growth for the purposes of reforms and structural adjustments.” "...

Pero en China... ahí esas medidas... en fin... podrán vender todo lo vendible, pero exigir a la población perder "privilegios", con lo que ellos han trabajado para llegar a donde están... ¿lo ven?... no se... ya veremos, quizás estoy yo sacando el artículo de contexto... quizás...

 

[voltaire]

Producir en China será tan costoso como en EE.UU. en 2016

Uno de los motivos del auge económico chino ha sido el competitivo coste de producción manufacturera, lo que provocaba una descentralización generalizada de las empresas occidentales para producir sus bienes en el país. Esto está cambiando muy rápidamente, y algunos analistas estiman que los costes manufactureros chinos alcanzarán los de EE.UU. en 2016.

"Es algo que nosotros anticipamos cuando fuimos a China, aunque no sabíamos como sucedería de rápido", afirma Mark Miller, CEo de Prince Industries.

Según un estudio de AlixPartners, para 2016 los costes de producir en China serán los mismos que producir en EE.UU.

"La ventaja competitiva de los costes de producción en China se ha erosionado dramáticamente en los últimos años. Si tu analizas 2005 vemos como los costes en China eran de un 25% a un 30% menor que en EE.UU. Ahora dos tercios de esa diferencia se ha eliminado. Si esa tendencia continúa, los costes se iguarán en los próximo 4 o 5 años", afirma este informe.

Esta reducción en los costes viene principalmente por la mejora de competitividad de los trabajadores de EE.UU. De cualquier forma, no se prevé un éxodo masivo de las compañías occidentales. "No creo que las compañías vayan a salir de China, porque la demanda doméstica del país está creciendo de un 8% a un 10% anual. Es un gran mercado que van a intentar aprovechar", afirma Hal Sirkin de Boston Consulting Group.

La Carta de la Bolsa - Producir en China será tan costoso como en EE.UU. en 2016

 

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

China factory PMI raises doubts about economy's strength | Reuters

China factory PMI raises doubts about economy's strength

By Langi Chiang and Jonathan Standing

BEIJING | Wed May 1, 2013 9:00am BST

(Reuters) - Growth in China's manufacturing sector unexpectedly slowed in April as new export orders fell, raising fresh doubts about the strength of the economy after a disappointing first quarter.

The official purchasing managers' index (PMI) fell to 50.6 in April from an 11-month high in March of 50.9. Analysts had expected the April PMI to be 51.0.

The pull back on the official PMI mirrored a similar decline in a preliminary HSBC PMI last week, suggesting China's exports engine faces headwinds from the euro zone recession and sluggish growth in the United States.

China's new government has signalled it will step up infrastructure investment, which analysts said will provide support for the economy in the second quarter.

"Overall, my general feel is that China is growing but slower than people expected say a month ago," said Alvin Pontoh, economist at TDSecurities in Singapore.

"But I don't think this is reason for alarm... this is probably what the new administration is looking for. Structurally, China cannot grow at 9 or 10 percent anymore, so over the next few years, you'd reasonably expect growth to edge lower to say 7 percent or so".

A string of global data, including lower than expected U.S. economic growth figures, has dented optimism seen at the start of the year that the world economy was picking up.

Market reaction to the PMI was muted as many countries in Asia and Europe are marking May 1 Labour Day holiday. China's markets are closed and will reopen on Thursday.

Benchmark three-month copper slipped and weighed on mining stocks in Australia amowing the PMI figures. The Australian and New Zealand dollars held their ground.

The official PMI figures showed a new orders sub-index fell to 51.7 in April from 52.3 in March, holding above 50 which separates expansion from contraction compared with a month earlier. However, the new export orders index fell to 48.6 from 50.9 in March, suggesting they were shrinking.

The input price sub index fell to 40.1 in April, its lowest in at least four years.

"The dip in April PMI shows that the foundation for China's economic recovery is still not solid," Zhang Liqun, an economist at the Development Research Centre, a top government think tank in Beijing, said in an emailed statement accompanying the index.

"All these show the possibility for China's growth to slow slightly in the future. We must work to stabilise domestic demand and make our economic recovery more sustainable," he said.

HSBC's preliminary PMI for April fell to 50.5 from 51.6 in March as new export orders shrank. The final reading is scheduled to be published on Thursday.

RECOVERY UNDER THREAT

The latest PMI adds risks to market expectations that China's annual economic expansion will pick up to 8.0 percent in the April-June quarter after it slipped in January to March to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent in the previous quarter.

Zhiwei Zhang, a China economist at Nomura, said in a client note before the PMI figures that he expects growth to ease again in the second quarter to 7.5 percent.

Apart from expectations of more infrastructure investment, the central bank will hold rates steady throughout 2013, as it needs to tread a delicate balance between inflation and growth, a Reuters poll showed.

"We still expect major activity indicators to show a moderate growth recovery in April and 2Q. On policies, we expect overall monetary and fiscal policies to remain accommodative, though we see no need for significant stimulus," said Ting Lu, a Hong-Kong-based China economist from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, in a note to clients.

Beijing is targeting 2013 growth of 7.5 percent, lower than the double digit levels of most of the past three decades as it tries to shift the economy to reduce reliance on exports and more towards consumption.

Still, the recovery from seven-straight quarters of a slowdown through the third quarter of 2012 has been uneven so far. Growth picked up in the fourth quarter but then slipped in the first quarter of this year despite a credit boom in January through March.

China's debt-ridden local governments used new lending to repay existing loans instead of channelling the money into new investment, analysts said.

The government has promised to heighten scrutiny of local government financing vehicles, wealth management products and the country's fledgling bond market.

The politburo, the top decision-making body, said in a meeting last week China would speed up the establishment of a regulatory system for local government debt financing while strengthening oversight on potential financial risks.

Shadow banking, a main driver of a credit surge in recent months, has provided a lifeline though to property funding, fuelling unwelcome housing inflation.

New home prices jumped 3.6 percent in March from a year ago, a third straight monthly increase despite an intensified government tightening campaign during the past three years.

La burbuja del coche de lujo en China a punto de estallar: cuestan un 62% más que en EEUU - elConfidencial.com

La burbuja del coche de lujo en China a punto de estallar: cuestan un 62% más que en EEUU

COMPARATIVA DEL WALL STREET JOURNAL

P.E. 26/04/2013 (11:30)

Quien decida comprar un Mercedes C-Class debería pensar bien dónde invertir su dinero. En China puede costarte aproximadamente un 62% más que si lo compras en Estados Unidos y otros países de la UE, unos 57.120 dólares.

Según publica el Wall Street Journal, el “pequeño y sucio” secreto de las empresas de lujo consiste en sociedades que desde hace una década ‘aprovechan’ el apetito comprador y caprichoso de los más pudientes clientes chinos, y les colocan los mismos bienes a precios totalmente inflados.

La comparación recogida por el rotativo entre diversos modelos de BMW, Mercedes y Audi, muestra que los automóviles en el gigante asiático cuestan de media un 64% más. Un dato que parece contradictorio, si se tiene en cuenta que los productos fabricados en China son normalmente más baratos. Además los precios chinos incluyen en el precio todos los impuestos al consumo, a diferencia de Estados Unidos. Pero, aún así, si se excluyeran todas las tasas gravadas en ambos vehículos, y se compararan, el precio en China subiría un 37% más.

Según el WST, esta tendencia alcista en los precios de los automóviles chinos existe desde hace mucho tiempo. Desde antes de que el gigante asiático entrara a formar parte de la Organización Mundial del Comercio (OMC) en 2011, los automóviles ya eran mucho más caros que en el resto de países miembros, y por supuesto, que en Occidente. Cuando hace dos años se unió a la OMC, el país no encontró ninguna necesidad para bajar los precios porque la demanda fue tan abrumadora que, incluso, muchos de los clientes estaban dispuestos a pagar un extra por recibir cuando antes su coche.

La brecha de precios es aún mayor cuando se trata de vehículos importados. Bernstein Reasearh también ha emitido un informe en el que estudia distintos casos. Los Audi A4 y BMW Serie 3 han encontrado las mayores diferencias. En China se compran respectivamente un 54% y un 76% más caros. A raíz de estos estudios, los grandes fabricantes automovilísticos justifican las desmesuradas divergencias de precios, que en muchos casos superan el 50%, asegurando que los coches vendidos en China incluyen algunas características más sofisticadas.

Sin embargo, 2013 puede ser un punto de inflexión. La demanda, suavizada cada vez más por el panorama de crisis económica mundial, y la amplísima oferta por parte de los fabricantes, podrían producir un cambio. Las ventas totales de Audi, BMW y Mercedes en China aumentaron en el primer trimestre sólo un 6%, en comparación con el 25% que alcanzaron en el cuarto trimestre del año anterior. Y las expectativas de futuro no mejoran, según declararon los propios fabricantes en el último Salón del Automóvil de Shanghai, lo que está empezando a causar algunos temores en las principales empresas de lujo.

Según Max Warburton, analista de Bernstein, “muchas de las empresas multinacionales dependen de los logros en China, donde hasta ahora estaban consiguiendo mantener o superar objetivos”. “El riesgo de una guerra de precios en China está cada vez más cerca. Las automovilísticas se podrían enfrentar a bajadas de precios del 10%”, afirma.

Las sociedades de bienes de lujo se han mostrado siempre reacias a la bajada de precios. Es sin duda, su última opción de una larga lista para sortear a una crisis. Lo mismo sucede con las grandes textiles de lujo, como Louis Vuitton o Gucci, cuyos precios son tradicionalmente un 50% más caros en China que en los países occidentales.

Las grandes marcas se enfrentan ahora a dos peligrosos factores novedosos para ellos: una fuerte caída de ventas en el gigante asiático, y un enorme aumento del turismo chino a Occidente. El principio del fin para ese “sucio y pequeño” secreto, porque la sociedad china prefiere comprarse un Mercedes en Alemania o un Vuitton en París, que pagarlo en Shanghái un 60% más caro.

“Tengo 20 casas en Pekn, donde paso un mes al ao. Por qu? Nunca habr una burbuja” - HISTORIAS DE ASIA - Cotizalia.com

“Tengo 20 casas en Pekín, donde paso un mes al año. ¿Por qué? Nunca habrá una burbuja”

Ángel Villarino. Pekín
HISTORIAS DE ASIA
24/04/2013

A principios de 2006, cuando vivía en Roma, un diario latinoamericano me encargó un extenso reportaje sobre la burbuja inmobiliaria que parecía estar madurando en varios países de la Unión Europea. Consulté con economistas italianos, españoles, franceses e ingleses para obtener una visión global del asunto. Para mi sorpresa, la opinión mayoritaria, al menos la que yo encontré, es que no existía nada parecido a una burbuja y que, en todo caso, no se trataba de un asunto grave. “No hay burbuja, sino una gran demanda”, decían. Recuerdo que tuve que hacer muchas llamadas para encontrar una voz distinta que sirviese de contrapunto. La anécdota me vuelve a la cabeza cada vez que escucho sentar cátedra sobre el ladrillo chino.

Leí el primer reportaje al respecto en 2007, ya instalado en Asia, un año antes de las Olimpiadas de Pekín. Los activos inmobiliarios chinos habían duplicado el PIB anual y su explosión, indicaban los analistas extranjeros, era algo inminente que traería consecuencias aún más catastróficas que la famosa burbuja nipona. El asunto parecía serio: en 1991, cuando Japón tocó techo, el valor de sus inmuebles era el equivalente al 20% de la riqueza mundial y el área metropolitana de Tokio valía lo mismo que todo el territorio de Estados Unidos. Gente como Jim Chanos, de Kynikos Associates, han llegado a decir en estos años que la caída de China será la peor de todos los tiempos, “mil veces peor que la de Dubái”.

Ha pasado un lustro desde entonces y el ritmo de construcción ha disminuido sensiblemente sin llegar a pinchar, mientras que los precios en general continúan en ascenso, sobre todo en las grandes ciudades. El alquiler de mi apartamento de Pekín, sin ir más lejos, ha crecido un 115% en los últimos cuatro años. Aunque el tema todavía se toca con mucho tacto en los medios de comunicación chinos, ha entrado dentro del discurso oficial y el Gobierno está haciendo esfuerzos para enfriar el mercado inmobiliario: restricciones legales, nuevos impuestos, trabas a la financiación… En Pekín ahora mismo sólo pueden comprar casa las familias empadronadas, las cuales están autorizadas a acumular una nueva propiedad por persona (hay maneras de burlar la restricción, pero resulta muy difícil y costoso ya que el cambio de residencia en China está férreamente limitado por el llamado 'hukou').

‘Seseñas’ con cientos de miles de casas vacías

La idea del Gobierno no es sólo frenar, sino también redistribuir la inversión. Sucede que cientos de miles de familias enriquecidas a lo largo y ancho del país y que buscan asegurar sus ahorros (China carece por ahora de productos financieros atractivos) están dispuestas a pagar lo que sea por una propiedad en Pekín o Shangái, donde consideran que su dinero está a salvo. Casi todos los chinos que acumulan un cierto patrimonio en sitios como Xian, Guiyang o Zhengzhou… (ciudades que siguen creciendo por encima de la media y donde viven millones de personas) prefieren hacerse con una casa en las dos metrópolis más prestigiosas del país. Mucho más difícil es convencerlos de que gasten su dinero en los cientos de faraónicos proyectos urbanísticos que surgen cerca de sus casas o sus pueblos natales. Algunos de ellos, como Ordos, forman urbes a estrenar con cientos de miles de casas vacías, Seseñas cuya fantasmagórica imagen aliña bien cualquier noticia al respecto.

Un fabricante de maquinaria agrícola de Dandong (ciudad de dos millones y medio de habitantes en la frontera con Corea del Norte) razonaba la semana pasada sobre esta concentración radical de la inversión inmobiliaria dentro de un país de las dimensiones de China. “Nunca me he planteado comprar más de una casa en Dandong, pero tengo veinte apartamentos en Pekín, un sitio en el que no paso más de un mes al año. ¿Por qué? Porque allí nunca va a estallar ninguna burbuja, allí está el poder. El sueño de 1.400 millones de chinos es tener casa en la capital, o en Shangái, porque son lugares únicos. Eso sin contar a los extranjeros, que van todos allí. Además, es prestigioso tener propiedades en la capital o mandar a tus hijos a vivir un periodo o a estudiar. Son todo ventajas. No hay nada así comparable en Europa. Imagínese un par de ciudades donde todos los americanos, europeos y japoneses hubiesen querido tener casa desde que empezó el éxodo rural. ¿Quién no habría querido comprar allí?”.

Desde China, y aunque el tema es oficialmente 'sensible' (lo que significa que los expertos y los medios de comunicación no pueden hablar con total libertad de ello), genera cada vez más indignación el hecho de que el precio de la vivienda sea hasta 30 veces superior al de los ingresos medios. Después, en un plano más teórico, preocupan los cerca de 70 millones de apartamentos a estrenar que hay ya en todo el país en lugares como Ordos, así como las delirantes infraestructuras y edificios públicos o semipúblicos a los que no se les está dando ningún uso: fuentes de mil caños en pleno desierto, teatros que no tienen ni butacas, auditorios donde nunca suena música, museos sin piezas que exhibir, etcétera. Algunos de ellos, además, están utilizando los materiales más caros en el mercado, como mármoles o metales costosos, para embellecer espacios que no disfruta nadie.

Pese a todo, y como sucedía en España hace no tanto tiempo, la opinión más extendida entre economistas chinos es negar la mayor. Expertos como Dong Fang, director del área inmobiliaria del Centro de Investigación de la Universidad Normal de Beijing, ofrecen argumentos demográficos, urbanísticos e históricos. En primer lugar, recuerda, China tiene 1.400 millones de habitantes y la prioridad para la mayoría de ellos es hacerse con una vivienda decente. Además, la migración del campo a las ciudades, que en las últimas décadas ha movido a unos 400 millones de chinos, sigue en curso. El Gobierno espera que la población urbana pase del 50% actual a más del 70% antes de 2020, una transición impulsada y tutelada por las autoridades para dar el próximo 'salto adelante', hacia una economía menos dependiente de las exportaciones y la inversión pública. “Desde los años 90 se dice en Occidente que los chinos tenemos burbuja. Sin embargo, nunca explota; al revés, los precios suben. Lo que pasa es que en China hay mucha menos tierra per cápita para urbanizar, así que es normal que las casas sean más caras. Por otra parte, hemos empezado muy tarde la urbanización y ahora está en pleno auge. Hace quince años ni siquiera existía el mercado inmobiliario, las casas las construía y distribuía el Estado: todos los propietarios son nuevos propietarios”, sostiene Dong, antes de concluir con un argumento que habíamos oído antes. “No hay burbuja, sino una gran demanda”.

 

[garibarba]

Producir en China será tan costoso como en EE.UU. en 2016

Uno de los motivos del auge económico chino ha sido el competitivo coste de producción manufacturera, lo que provocaba una descentralización generalizada de las empresas occidentales para producir sus bienes en el país. Esto está cambiando muy rápidamente, y algunos analistas estiman que los costes manufactureros chinos alcanzarán los de EE.UU. en 2016.

"Es algo que nosotros anticipamos cuando fuimos a China, aunque no sabíamos como sucedería de rápido", afirma Mark Miller, CEo de Prince Industries.

Según un estudio de AlixPartners, para 2016 los costes de producir en China serán los mismos que producir en EE.UU.

"La ventaja competitiva de los costes de producción en China se ha erosionado dramáticamente en los últimos años. Si tu analizas 2005 vemos como los costes en China eran de un 25% a un 30% menor que en EE.UU. Ahora dos tercios de esa diferencia se ha eliminado. Si esa tendencia continúa, los costes se iguarán en los próximo 4 o 5 años", afirma este informe.

Esta reducción en los costes viene principalmente por la mejora de competitividad de los trabajadores de EE.UU. De cualquier forma, no se prevé un éxodo masivo de las compañías occidentales. "No creo que las compañías vayan a salir de China, porque la demanda doméstica del país está creciendo de un 8% a un 10% anual. Es un gran mercado que van a intentar aprovechar", afirma Hal Sirkin de Boston Consulting Group.

La Carta de la Bolsa - Producir en China será tan costoso como en EE.UU. en 2016

Aquí el informe:
http://www.alixpartners.com/en/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=l1diPmnb044=&tabid=1987

---------- Post added 01-may-2013 at 15:02 ----------

¿Alguien me podría decir si se puede decir lo mismo de europa?

 

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

:
Por qué han desaparecido 28.000 ríos chinos de golpe - elConfidencial.com

Por qué han desaparecido 28.000 ríos chinos de golpe

NO TIENE QUE VER CON EL CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO

Miguel Ayuso 02/05/2013 (06:00)

Hace 20 años, según los registros oficiales, había en China 50.000 ríos de más de 100 kilómetros cuadrados. Hoy, según el Primer Censo Nacional del Agua (que el Gobierno chino hizo público hace un mes), hay sólo 22.909. En sólo dos décadas, el país asiático ha visto desaparecer de sus mapas 28.000 ríos, casi la mitad de todos los que estaba registrados. En términos absolutos la desaparición de estos ríos equivaldría a borrar del mapa el río Misisipi entero, tal como han calculado dos ambientalistas de la Universidad de Yale tras sumar el caudal total de los ríos desaparecidos.

Según explicó Huang He, director adjunto del grupo que ha elaborado el estudio, en la presentación del mismo, la supuesta desaparición de los ríos se debe principalmente a que las estimaciones anteriores sobre estos eran inexactas, pues se habían obtenido usando “incompletos mapas topográficos de los años 50”. He admitió que el cambio climático también podría haber jugado un papel importante en la desaparición de algunos ríos, pero en ningún momento apuntó a la sobrexplotación de los recursos hídricos que es, según la mayoría de expertos, la verdadera causa del problema.

Una sobreexplotación radical

Los expertos tienen claro que la desaparición de los ríos chinos no tiene nada que ver con el cambio climático, y mucho menos con problemas en los mapas que, aseguran, siempre han sido muy precisos en China, un país con una gran tradición al respecto.

Pese al secretismo con el que el Gobierno chino suele tratar este tipo de informaciones, el estudio en cuestión es público y la información ha desatado todo tipo de críticas internas. En una entrevista concedida al diario británico The Times, Ma Jun, director del Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs y uno de los mayores expertos en temas medioambientales de China, ha mostrado públicamente sus dudas sobre la explicación oficial del fenómeno: “Puede que haya una disparidad en el número de ríos debido a los diferentes métodos de investigación, pero su desaparición es una realidad y está causada por la sobrexplotación de los recursos hídricos”.

En opinión de Jun, una de las mayores causas de la desaparición de los ríos es el uso incontrolado de los acuíferos subterráneos y otra la desertificación de los bosques (debido a la explotación maderera) que ha provocado un descenso de las lluvias en las áreas montañosas. Todo esto sin olvidar la construcción de grandes presas hidroeléctricas, unas construcciones que, según Jun, han tenido que jugar un papel importante en todo este asunto. Una presa como las de las Tres Gargantas (de largo, la más grande del mundo), ha logrado llevar agua a regiones con problemas de abastecimiento, pero a costa, seguramente, de secar algún que otro río.

No es de extrañar que la desaparición de casi la mitad de los ríos chinos haya coincidido con una importante fase de industrialización y urbanización. Entre 1990 y 2000 las ciudades chinas han crecido casi en 13.000 km2, un área mayor que la Región de Murcia (que mide 11.000 km2), con el impacto medioambiental que esto supone. En el último Índice de Desempeño Medioambiental, que realiza anualmente la Universidad de Yale, China obtuvo una de las peores puntuaciones y salió especialmente malparada en cuanto a la gestión de los recursos hídricos.

La legislación china en materia de aguas es especialmente pobre. Cualquier persona, familia o empresa puede hacer uso de los recursos hídricos sin pedir ningún tipo de permiso, excepto para proyectos a “gran escala”. Pero nadie dice que es un proyecto a “gran escala”. Esto ha llevado a una sobreexplotación brutal de los acuíferos subterráneos y, por tanto, a la desaparición de los ríos.

Unas críticas toleradas

El nuevo ejecutivo chino, liderado desde el 14 de marzo por Xi Jinping, ha mostrado su intención de ser más cuidadoso en cuestiones medioambientales y, aunque no ha tardado en echar balones fuera para explicar las preocupantes cifras, ha tolerado de manera bastante inusual cierto grado de crítica.

Los reproches a la política medioambiental del Gobierno han aparecido, incluso, entre miembros del propio ejecutivo. Un portavoz del Ministerio de Educación ha publicado en el Twitter chino, Sina Weibo, un llamamiento al presidente, para que se tome en serio estos asuntos: “Sugerencias para el jefe Xi. Cada vez tenemos más dinero y menos agua. Sugiero al Gobierno, a todos los niveles, que desacelere inmediatamente el desarrollo económico y haga de la protección medioambiental su primera prioridad, de lo contrario, los funcionarios no seremos valiosos”.

No es descartable que este tipo de mensajes sean tolerados (e incluso alentados) por el Gobierno de cara a mejorar su imagen internacional pero, en cualquier caso, muestran un cambio en la mentalidad del país asiático. Cosa aparte es que las críticas tengan algún efecto y, lo que es más importante, que lleguen a tiempo.

China guides renminbi to fresh high against US dollar - FT.com

China guides renminbi to fresh high against US dollar
May 2, 2013 7:25 am

By Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing

The Chinese renminbi marched to a record high against the US dollar on Thursday, adding to a recent burst of appreciation and spurring talk that Beijing is poised to soon let the currency trade more freely.

Over the past three weeks the renminbi has gained 0.6 per cent against the dollar, an unusually fast rise for the tightly controlled Chinese currency and one that has come even as the dollar has been relatively strong.

The renminbi’s upward trajectory continued on Thursday after a three-day public holiday, with the central bank setting a record high in its daily fixing of the reference rate for the currency. During the day’s trading, the renminbi reached 6.1537 against the dollar, its strongest ever.

The mini-surge has fuelled speculation that the People’s Bank of China could be preparing the ground for a more flexible exchange rate mechanism.

Currently, the renminbi can rise or fall by 1 per cent from a daily reference rate fixed in the morning by the central bank. Analysts say this trading band may soon be widened to 2 per cent, a gesture by Beijing to show that it wants to move towards a more market-determined exchange rate.

Yi Gang, a central bank deputy governor, said last month that an increase in the renminbi’s floating band was probable “in the near future”.

It would be the second year in a row that the central bank has widened the trading band, having doubled it from 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent last April.

By pushing the renminbi higher, the central bank could be attempting to guide the currency to a level where it is as likely to fall as to rise against the dollar in order to ensure that a wider band does not simply invite traders to bet on appreciation.

“The recent moves may reflect a strategy to accelerate the search for the equilibrium value to eventually dash the one-way plays,” analysts at Citi wrote in a recent note to clients.

Nevertheless, it is easy to overstate the significance of the potential shift to a wider trading band, according to Mark Williams and Wang Qinwei, analysts at Capital Economics.

In a research note on Thursday, they showed that the renminbi’s 1 per cent trading band was already wide enough to accommodate the normal daily fluctuations of completely free-floating currencies such as the dollar and the euro.

The limiting factor in the renminbi’s movement has not been the trading band but rather the central bank’s daily fixing of the currency. Even when pressure for the renminbi to appreciate is strong, as it has been this year, the central bank has continually guided the currency back to a weaker level with its daily fixing and also intervened to buy up the foreign exchange streaming into China, Messrs Williams and Wang said.

“How fast the currency moves over the medium term is determined by how [the central bank] sets the reference rate, not the size of the trading band,” they said.

Ah, y dejo este artículo de Martin Wolf también:
Why China’s economy might topple - FT.com

As Japan has shown, shifting to a lower-growth model is risky

April 2, 2013 6:42 pm
Why China’s economy might topple

By Martin Wolf

Over the next decade, China’s growth will slow, probably sharply. That is not the view of malevolent outsiders. It is the view of the Chinese government. The question is whether it will do so smoothly or abruptly. On the answer depends not only China’s own future, but also that of much of the world.

Official Chinese thinking was on display at last month’s China Development Forum, organised by the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRC), which brought influential foreigners together with high-level officials. Among the background papers was one prepared by economists at the DRC, entitled “Ten-year Outlook: Decline of Potential Growth Rate and Start of a New Phase of Growth”. Its proposition is that China’s growth will slow from more than 10 per cent a year from 2000 to 2010 to 6.5 per cent between 2018 and 2022. Such a decline, notes the paper, is consistent with the slowdown since the second quarter of 2010 (see chart).

The authors note two possible reasons for the decline: either China has fallen into the “middle income trap” of aborted industrialisation; or it is managing the “natural landing” that occurs when an economy begins to catch up with advanced economies. This latter scenario played out in Japan in the 1970s and South Korea in the 1990s. The DRC paper argues that, after 35 years of 10 per cent growth, it is at last happening to China.

Here are a few reasons why the authors say this view is plausible. First, the potential for infrastructure investment has “contracted conspicuously”, with its share in fixed asset investment down from 30 per cent to 20 per cent over the past decade. Second, returns on assets have fallen and overcapacity has soared. The “incremental capital output ratio” – a measure of the growth generated by a given level of investment – reached 4.6 in 2011, the highest since 1992. China is getting less growth bang for its investment buck. Third, growth of the labour supply has fallen sharply. Fourth, urbanisation is still rising, but at a decelerating rate. Finally, risks are growing in the finance of local governments and real estate.

This melange of reasons is enough, argue the authors, to indicate that a transition to slower growth has begun. To analyse prospects more rigorously, the authors employ an economic model. Its most striking result is that long-established trends reverse. Fixed investment rose to 49 per cent of GDP in 2011. But this is forecast to fall to 42 per cent in 2022. Meanwhile, the share of consumption in GDP is forecast to rise from 48 to per cent to 56 per cent in 2022. Again, the share of industry is forecast to decline from 45 per cent of GDP to 40 per cent, while the share of services is to jump from 45 per cent to 55 per cent. The economy is consumption-led, instead of investment-led. On the supply side, the principal driver of the decline in growth is the collapse in the growth of the capital stock, as investment growth falls. (See charts.)

The view that such a growth slowdown is imminent is quite plausible. But one can advance a more optimistic view. According to the Conference Board’s data, China’s GDP per head (at purchasing power parity) is the same as Japan’s in 1966 and South Korea’s in 1988. These countries then had between seven and nine years of superfast growth ahead, respectively. Relative to US levels (another measure of catch-up potential), China is where Japan was in 1950 and South Korea in 1982. That suggests yet more growth potential. China’s GDP per head is just over a fifth of US levels. It seems to have much further to go.

However, there is also a case against this optimistic view. China is an order of magnitude bigger even than Japan. Its opportunities, particularly in the world economy, must be relatively smaller. Furthermore, as former premier Wen Jiabao often stated, growth has been “unbalanced, unco-ordinated and unsustainable”. This is true, on a number of dimensions. But the most significant is the dependence on investment, not just as a source of extra capacity, but as a source of demand. Consistently rising investment rates are not sustainable, since the returns ultimately depend on additional consumption.

This is where a far more pessimistic view emerges. As the experience of Japan has shown, managing a shift from a high-investment, high-growth economy to a lower-investment, lower-growth economy is very tricky. I can envisage at least three risks.

First, if expected growth falls from over 10 to, say, 6 per cent, the needed rate of investment in productive capital will collapse: under a constant incremental capital output ratio the fall would be from 50 per cent to, say, 30 per cent of GDP. If swift, such a decline would cause a depression, all on its own.

Second, a big jump in credit has gone together with reliance on real estate and other investments with falling marginal returns. Partly for this reason, the decline in growth is likely to miccionan a rise in bad debts, not least on the investments made on the assumption that past growth would continue. The fragility of the financial system could increase very sharply, not least in the rapidly expanding “shadow banking” sector.

Third, since there is little reason to expect a decline in the household savings rate, sustaining the envisaged rise in consumption, relative to investment, demands a matching shift in incomes towards households and away from corporations, including state enterprises. This can happen: the growing labour shortage and a move towards higher interest rates might deliver it smoothly. But, even so, there is also a clear risk that the resulting decline in profits would accelerate a collapse in investment.

The government’s plan is, of course, to make the transition to a better balanced and slower-growing economy smoothly. This is far from impossible. The government has all the levers it needs. Moreover, the economy continues to have much potential. But managing a decline in the growth rate without an investment collapse and financial disruption is far trickier than any general equilibrium model suggests.

It is easy to think of economies that long showed superlative performance but failed to manage the inevitable slowdown. Japan is an example. China can avoid that fate, partly because it still has so much growth potential. But the chances of accidents are high. I would not expect one to stop China’s rise altogether. But the decade to come could be far bumpier than the last.

 

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

El PMI oficial de servicios baja del 55, es decir, entra en la zona "neutra" 45-55 (donde no hay crecimiento claro ni tampoco colapso):
China April official services PMI at 54.5 vs 55.6 in March | Reuters

China April official services PMI at 54.5 vs 55.6 in March

BEIJING | Thu May 2, 2013 11:14pm EDT

(Reuters) - Expansion in China's services sector slowed in April, an official survey showed on Friday, in line with slower factory activity and reinforcing views that recovery in the world's second-largest economy remains modest and faces risks.

China's official purchasing managers' index(PMI) for the non-manufacturing sector fell to 54.5 in April from 55.6 in March, the National Bureau of Statistics(NBS) said on Friday.

Slowing growth in services showed that subdued expansion in manufacturing has begun to feed through to the rest of the economy, though the services industry has so far weathered the global slowdown much better than the factory sector.

"New orders for the services industry dropped below 50, lower than the historical average levels. The prices index also declined relatively sharply, showing operating activity is moderating," said Cai Jin, a vice president at CFLP, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing. (The 50 level separates contraction from expansion.)

The CFLP conducts the official survey together with China's National Bureau of Statistics.

"We should pay attention to supporting service industries and expanding consumption demand to enhance their role in supporting overall stable economic growth," Cai said in a statement accompanying the data.

Two recent PMIs showing cooling in manufacturing sector growth have already suggested the euro zone recession and sluggish U.S. demand may be risks to China's economic recovery, though economists see a mild pickup this year, aided by government support.

The official PMI's sub-index for construction fell to 62.4 in April from 62.5 in March.

The new orders sub-index fell to 50.9 from 52, while the index for new orders excluding construction dropped to 49.8 from 51.4 in March.

Firms in catering, transport and maintenance had fewer new orders in April, while new orders for hotels, telecommunications, broadcasting, television and satellite transmission services fared better, the NBS said.

China's economic growth unexpectedly stumbled in the first quarter, slipping to 7.7 percent versus 7.9 percent in the previous three month period, as factory output and investment slowed.

 

[GnomoLoKo]

Es decir que tiene que estar por el 35-45 en realidad y con suerte

 

[kemao2]

Y eso que todavía no han entrado en vigor los pactos por los que China deja flotar su moneda que entonces si se va a hundir la competitividad . Eso esa previsto para 2016- 2017 así que si dan esa fecha es por algo .

Lo interesante será ver como toda su burbuja inmobiliaria se hunde por esas fechas tras el paron industrial

Producir en China será tan costoso como en EE.UU. en 2016

Uno de los motivos del auge económico chino ha sido el competitivo coste de producción manufacturera, lo que provocaba una descentralización generalizada de las empresas occidentales para producir sus bienes en el país. Esto está cambiando muy rápidamente, y algunos analistas estiman que los costes manufactureros chinos alcanzarán los de EE.UU. en 2016.

"Es algo que nosotros anticipamos cuando fuimos a China, aunque no sabíamos como sucedería de rápido", afirma Mark Miller, CEo de Prince Industries.

Según un estudio de AlixPartners, para 2016 los costes de producir en China serán los mismos que producir en EE.UU.

"La ventaja competitiva de los costes de producción en China se ha erosionado dramáticamente en los últimos años. Si tu analizas 2005 vemos como los costes en China eran de un 25% a un 30% menor que en EE.UU. Ahora dos tercios de esa diferencia se ha eliminado. Si esa tendencia continúa, los costes se iguarán en los próximo 4 o 5 años", afirma este informe.

Esta reducción en los costes viene principalmente por la mejora de competitividad de los trabajadores de EE.UU. De cualquier forma, no se prevé un éxodo masivo de las compañías occidentales. "No creo que las compañías vayan a salir de China, porque la demanda doméstica del país está creciendo de un 8% a un 10% anual. Es un gran mercado que van a intentar aprovechar", afirma Hal Sirkin de Boston Consulting Group.

La Carta de la Bolsa - Producir en China será tan costoso como en EE.UU. en 2016

 

[Serpiente_Plyskeen]

El PMI chino de servicios de HSBS cae al 51.1 en Abril:
China services growth slows sharply, adds to recovery risk | Reuters

China services growth slows sharply, adds to recovery risk

A parking lot is seen along the Huangpu River near the financial district of Pudong in Shanghai December 12, 2012. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

BEIJING | Sun May 5, 2013 11:33pm EDT

(Reuters) - Growth in China's services sector slowed sharply in April to its lowest point since August 2011, a private sector survey showed on Monday - fresh evidence of rising risks to a revival in the world's No.2 economy.

The HSBC services Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) fell to 51.1 in April from 54.3 in March, with new order expansion the slowest in 20 months and staffing levels in the service sector decreasing for the first time since January 2009.

Two separate PMIs last week had already shown that China's manufacturing sector growth slowed, With the weakness spreading to services, which make up almost half of gross domestic product, the risk to the recovery may be increasing.

"The weak HSBC service PMI figure provides further evidence of a slowdown not only in the factory sector but also in the service sector," said Zhang Zhiwei, chief China economist at Nomura Securities in Hong Kong.

"This confirms our worries about insufficient growth momentum in the economy, which we expect to slow to 7.5 percent in the second quarter."

The HSBC services PMI amows a similar survey by China's National Bureau of Statistics, which found non-manufacturing activity eased to 54.5 from 55.6. The official PMI is more weighted towards large state-owned firms.

Readings above 50 indicate activity in the sector is growing, while those below 50 indicate it is contracting.

The HSBC survey showed that the sub-index measuring new business orders dropped sharply to a 20-month low of 51.5 in April, with only 15 percent of survey respondents reporting an increased volume of new orders that month, HSBC said.

"This started to bite employment growth. All these are likely to add some risk to China's growth in 2Q, as there's still a bumpy road towards sustaining growth recovery," said HSBC's China chief economist Qu Hongbin.

The employment sub-index decreased to 49.6 in April, the first net reduction in staff numbers since January 2009, although HSBC said job losses were marginal, partially caused by firms down-sizing and employee resignations.

Employment is a decisive factor shaping government thinking because it is crucial for social stability. The services sector accounted for 46 percent of China's gross domestic product in 2012, as big as the country's better-known manufacturing industry.

China's economic growth unexpectedly stumbled in the first quarter, slipping to 7.7 percent versus 7.9 percent in the previous three month period, as factory output and investment slowed.

The government has set a 2013 growth target of 7.5 percent, a level Beijing deems sufficient for job creation while providing some room to reform to the economy.

Any more weak data could spark a policy response.

"The risk of slower growth is rising, the Chinese government will probably take actions after April data come out," said Jianguang Shen, chief China economist of Mizuho Securities Asia in Hong Kong.

"I see an increasing possibility for China to cut interest rates, but not likely any time in the near future, as housing inflation is a constraint."

However a Reuters poll last month found that China's central bank is expected to keep the benchmark one-year bank lending rate at 6 percent and the one-year bank deposit rate at 3 percent through 2013, as well as holding banks' reserve requirement ratios (RRR) steady.

China targets hot money inflows with new forex rules | Reuters

China targets hot money inflows with new forex rules

By Gabriel Wildau

SHANGHAI/BEIJING | Mon May 6, 2013 4:39am EDT

(Reuters) - China has released new rules to curb currency speculation amid signs that hot money inflows have helped push the yuan to a series of record highs in recent weeks.

The rules tighten limits on long yuan positions that banks can hold for their own accounts and aim to discourage firms from using dollar loans as a means to speculate on yuan gains.

Regulators will also increase scrutiny on exporters who channel money into the country disguised as trade payments, according to the announcement from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) on Sunday.

The changes suggest that "a level of tolerance over the nature of RMB appreciation has been breached," Paul Mackel, head of Asian FX at HSBC, wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

The yuan has gained 1.2 percent in 2013, of which 0.9 percent has occurred since the beginning of April. Analysts and traders agree that heavy speculative capital flows have fuelled this rise. (GRAPHIC: link.reuters.com/raz74t)

The yuan fell by as much as 0.3 percent to 6.1768 per dollar at its low point on Monday afternoon, a big drop by the standards of China's tightly controlled currency, though it recovered to 6.1660 near the close.

FOREX LOANS

The new net open position limits apply to banks whose foreign-currency loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) exceeds the reference rate of 75 percent for Chinese banks and 100 percent for foreign banks.

Moreover, the higher a bank's forex LDR, the more tightly its long yuan positions will be restricted when the new position limits take effect at end-June.

The move should make foreign currency loans more expensive, as the rules incentivize banks to set aside more forex deposits against their loans. Onshore forex deposit rates may also rise, as banks try to attract more deposits.

"A lot of the RMB's recent strength has come from onshore, where domestics have been borrowing more in foreign currency and holding more assets in RMB," wrote Mackel, referring to the Chinese currency by an alternate name.

"We have felt that these flows were adding to the hot money inflow pressures," he wrote.

Firms that earn revenue in yuan prefer to borrow in dollars if they expect the yuan to rise, because the loan becomes cheaper to repay in yuan terms.

Forex loans outstanding rose by 10 percent in the first three months of 2013, official data shows. The system-wide forex LDR stood at 171 percent at end-March. That suggests most banks will be subject to the new rules.

China ran a capital and financial account surplus of $102 billion in the first quarter, up from $20 billion in the fourth quarter last year, reflecting the heavy capital inflows.

In addition to strong demand from corporates betting on yuan gains, banks have also accumulated proprietary long yuan positions in an effort to profit from the trend, foreign exchange dealers say.

Policy banks such as China Development Bank, as well as banks whose forex LDR is already below the reference rate, are exempt from the new regulations.

FAKE TRADE

Many analysts expressed skepticism about China's export figures for March, suspecting that unusually high exports to Hong Kong may reflect companies inflating export invoices in order to skirt China's capital controls and convert more dollars into yuan.

SAFE said on Sunday it would hand down a risk warning notice 10 days after it finds that a firm's capital flows do not match physical goods shipments or if the firm is channeling unusually large amounts of money into China.

Such companies will then be placed on the SAFE's B list, which is for companies that are more closely monitored, for three consecutive months and will only be moved back on the A list if all the relevant indicators return to the normal range.

Chinese exporters and importers often bring capital into or out of the country disguised under their trade accounts, and SAFE has launched regular campaigns against the practice.

The Customs Administration is scheduled to announce April trade data on Wednesday. Exports in March grew 10 percent from a year earlier and imports rose 14.1 percent.

SAFE said it would finalize the B list and send out the first batch of warnings before May 10.

 

[kemao2]

LO cierto es que ya están en niveles prox a contracción al estar cerca ya de 50. Y eso que todavía no se ha producido la revaluación fuerte que se espera de aqui a 2016. El crecimiento del PIB lo deben sostener a base de gasto publico .





Readings above 50 indicate activity in the sector is growing, while those below 50 indicate it is contracting.

El PMI chino de servicios de HSBS cae al 51.1 en Abril:
China services growth slows sharply, adds to recovery risk | Reuters


China targets hot money inflows with new forex rules | Reuters