Totting up Germany’s eurozone exposure http://t.co/V6O6Kc4a
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Asia Channel: Latest Posts
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Asia
Chinese Buyers Defer and Default
Reuters does a pretty good job of putting together this story on how a Chinese city saved a small state-owned firm from going bankrupt by bailing out the holders of its commercial paper in full. Bank loans remain uncertain! FT reported on its website on 20th May that some Chinese buyers of thermal coal and iron ore are deferring [...]
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Asia
China – No Guarantee
In my debate with Andrew Batson in The Guardian in March, I noted that: There really are two related but distinct things people have in mind when they talk about a “hard landing” for China. The first is a rapid deceleration of GDP growth – below, say, 7%. The second is some kind of financial [...]
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Asia
China Real Estate Unravels
As a prelude to a broader analysis of China’s GDP, and the accuracy of its official GDP figures, I want to start by examining the national real estate statistics for the first four months of 2012. This discussion feeds into the broader GDP picture, but the property story that has been unfolding is important and [...]
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Asia
India on a Roll?
On Monday (7th May), India’s Finance Minister tried to undo the damage that his budget, presented in early March, had caused on investor sentiment towards India. More specifically, retrospective amendments to Indian tax laws and the implementation of General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) sowed confusion and led to heartburn. It was not so much that the [...]
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Asia
China’s Pulitzer Prize
I just got back from a two-week family visit back to the U.S., and things have been anything but quiet while I was gone: naval confrontations in the South China Seas, Chen Guangcheng’s flight to the U.S. embassy, the annual US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) in Beijing … and now, the expulsion of a [...]
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Asia
China Gives Up On Europe, Will Target Africa Instead
That China has finally given up on Europe is no news (granted, however, it will make it more complicated for various European newspaper to make up articles alleging China will bail out Europe now that this is no longer the case): after all even the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund has finally learned its lesson, and [...]
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Asia
Revisiting Predictions for China
In 2006 I started making a number of predictions based on what I thought was the necessary and logical development of China’s growth model. Some of these predictions seemed fairly outlandish, especially to China analysts – Chinese and foreign – who had very little knowledge of economic history or other developing countries, but many of [...]
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Asia
Australian House Prices down 10% from Peak
There are several providers of statistics on Australian house prices, but only one that doesn’t have a vested interest in the direction house prices actually move in: the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So despite the criticisms of this series—that it’s based on detached dwellings only, based on median sales data, too infrequent, not adjusted for [...]
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Asia
India: Treaties that Gave Away the Store
As India grapples with the Vodafone and 2G fallout, the Bilateral Investment Treaties it signed a few years ago are coming back to haunt it. On April 17, British telecom giant Vodafone issued a notice of dispute to the Indian government, as a first step towards launching investment arbitration proceedings under the India-Netherlands Bilateral Investment [...]
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Asia
India: Drama of the Outlook Downgrade
Here is the S&P announcement on downgrading the outlook on India’s lowest investment grade credit rating. By and large, I think it is a reasonable decision. I am not ‘shocked‘. It is interesting that the linked BS article talks of Indian FinMin officials expecting an upgrade. That shows how far they are out of touch [...]
