China Warns Officials: Allow Social Unrest, Lose Your Job
To be sure, there are always going to be financial and geopolitical landmines and every once in awhile we – and by “we” we’re referring to the market, or the country, or humanity, or whatever collective you want to choose – are going to step on one on the way to ushering in a black swan event.
But when we look out across markets and across the political landscape it’s difficult to escape the feeling that there are more black swans waiting in the wings – so to speak – than usual. There’s the threat of a dirty bomb being detonated in a crowded Western European urban center for instance. Or the chance that Turkey ends up “accidentally” killing a Russian or Iranian soldier while shelling the Azaz corridor. And how about the possibility that China tries to save its economy by chancing a 30% devaluation of the yuan and inadvertently plunges the world into a crisis far worse than 2008?
The interesting thing to note about the third crisis event listed above is that an economic implosion in China may spawn a black swan far larger than that which would emanate from a crisis in the country’s banking sector and/or a deeper devaluation of the RMB.
As we’ve discussed on multiple occasions of late, China desperately needs to purge its economy of excess capacity. The industrial sector is weighed down by too much debt and too little demand, but an acute overcapacity problem prevents the market from getting anywhere close to clearing. Either Beijing moves quickly to ameliorate this, or else a wave of defaults will ripple through the industrial complex on the way to crippling the country’s banking sector, where NPLs are probably at least five times greater than the official numbers suggest.
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