BEIJING WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM « The Burning Platform.
The Chinese stock market hit a four year high today at 3,020. This is up 53% since the middle of 2013 low and up 48% in the last six months. I guess this must mean the Chinese economy is operating on all cylinders. If you think so, you’d be wrong. Barron’s interviewed a no-nonsense woman who has lived, worked and analyzed China from within since 1985. Anne Stevenson-Yang has spent the bulk of her professional life there working as a journalist, magazine publisher, and software executive, with stints in between heading up the U.S. Information Technology office and the China operations of the U.S.-China Business Council. She’s now research director of J Capital, an outfit that works for foreign investors in China doing fundamental research on local companies and tracking macroeconomic developments.
This lady is about as blunt as you can get about Chinese fraud, lies, mal-investment, and data manipulation. The entire Chinese economic miracle is a fraud. The reforms are false. The leaders are corrupt and as evil as ever. The entire edifice is built upon a Himalayan mountain of bad debt.
The slave labor manufacturer for the world’s mal-investments since 2008 make Japan look like pikers.
China, for all its talk about economic reform, is in big trouble. The old model of relying on export growth and heavy investment to power the economy isn’t working anymore. Sure, the nation has been hugely successful over recent decades in providing its people with literacy, a decent life, basic health care, shelter, and safe cities. But starting in 2008, China sought to counter global recession with huge amounts of ill-advised investment in redundant industrial capacity and vanity infrastructure projects—you know, airports with no commercial flights, highways to nowhere, and stadiums with no teams. The country is now submerged by the tsunami of bad debt that begets further unhealthy credit growth to service this debt.
The BLS should take lessons from the Chinese government in data falsification. But, the American MSM dutifully reports the Chinese data as if it was real. Faux journalism at its finest.
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