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Tag: China

Latest data confirm China slowdown

As a confirmation of a significant downward adjustment to China’s growth (discussed here), a battery of economic reports this morning all came in materially below expectations.

1. Fixed asset investment:

Source: Investing.com

2. Industrial production:

Source: Investing.com

3. Retail sales:

Source: Investing.com

Clearly there is a seasonal component to these indicators, which may have been impacted by the New Year’s holiday. But on a year-over-year basis much of that should have been reflected in the forecasts.

BW: – “The fairly dramatic slowdown is unusual in Chinese economic history of the last decade” and the figures were “shockingly weak,” said Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior economist and strategist at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong. “It points to a major deceleration of momentum in the beginning of 2014,” wrote Kowalczyk in a research note.

Not surprisingly, over the past few days the equity market has been reflecting these worsening fundamentals.

Large cap PRC equities ETF (ticker: FXI) – down 6% in 5 days

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Is China "trading" treasuries? Sober Look

China reduced its holdings of treasuries in December by the largest amount since 2011, raising some eyebrows among economists and debt investors. The sentiment among analysts is that this reduction is related to Fed’s taper, which of course doesn’t bode well for treasuries in the near-term.

Bloomberg: – “The Chinese move to sell suggests central banks are becoming more wary of taking duration risk now with the Federal Reserve firmly into the tapering process,” said Aaron Kohli, an interest-rate strategist … at BNP Paribas … “If China continues to sell again in the next month or two, than more worries will arise as to who will buy the country’s debt.”

What’s interesting however is that China’s treasury position “adjustments” throughout last year seem to follow treasury prices (inverse of yields). This is akin to a retail investor buying high and selling low – chasing the market with everyone else. While analysts often assign some degree of sophistication to China’s investment strategy, the positioning in the chart below resembles a fairly incompetent trading behavior, an unsuccessful attempt to “time” the market.

Source: The US Treasury

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