Esto es el NEW NORMAL. Es como nos figuramos que estará la economía una vez se supere la crisis de deuda, de apalancamiento, que sufre el sistema occidental. En el caso chino, el new normal es que crezcan por debajo del acostumbrado 10% que han experimentado en los últimos 30 años. Se dice que podrían crecer en la siguiente década del entorno del 8%... Me quedo con su “new normal”. Y no me gusta nada el nuestro ya que el proceso de rescate, lo que implica, es que pedimos más deudas para tapar nuestras cuantiosas deudas. Lejos de desapalancar el cúmulo inmenso de deudas, lo que estamos haciendo, con el Gobierno a la cabeza, es pedir más créditos, 100.000 millones de euros para tapar los agujeros de la banca, luego les quitamos los activos inmobiliarios malos y los metemos en un banco malo, de propiedad estatal, para que los pobres banqueros puedan sacar adelante sus negocios, a volverse a equivocar si es el caso, pero que den crédito (podrían haber creado un banco nuevo estatal que fuera el que diera los prestamos que la banca privada no da, pero eso no se les ocurre). Y por último, el rescate a España, que será muy cuantioso, se habla del entorno de los 500.000 millones de euros, que tendremos que devolver euro sobre euro, en los siguientes 30 años… Dejamos el país jodido, hundido, sin futuro ninguno… Ole lo bien que lo estáis haciendo coñe. Depresión total de la economía y deudas nuevas para la eternidad…, todo por salvar a la banca, pobrecitos!!!
China decline sparks ‘new normal’ debate
Keeping track of growth: migrant workers toil on a railway line at a station in Quanzhou, southeast
China’s economic slowdown has triggered a debate about a deceptively simple question: what is the country’s “new normal” growth rate?
During the past three decades, businesses and investors became accustomed to 10 per cent annual growth. There were periods of overheating and undershooting but the economy always gravitated towards 10 per cent.
Analysts believe those double-digit days are firmly in the past. But there is no consensus about the economy’s new growth trend, with estimates ranging from 7 per cent to 9.5 per cent.
This disagreement might sound trivial – after all, even at 7 per cent, China would handily outperform virtually every other country in the world. But the difference is in fact monumental – the faster growth rate would make China about $3tn wealthier in a decade and keep global commodity prices a lot higher for a lot longer.
Qu Hongbin, an economist with HSBC, is unabashedly in the bullish camp.
“China’s economy is slowing but this is mainly the result of cyclical factors such as weakening external demand and the lagged impact of earlier tightening measures,” he wrote in a recent report.
In his view, the government must adopt counter-cyclical measures – more fiscal spending and more monetary easing – to boost gross domestic product.
The latest batch of data has led analysts to conclude that growth in the third quarter will be closer to 7 per cent. Industrial output growth fell to its lowest since May 2009 in August. But the government has approved a spate of major investments, including 25 new urban rail projects, in the past week that could provide a lift over the rest of the year.
Many analysts counsel against another round of heavy government spending. One of the louder voices in the bearish camp is Andy Xie, an independent economist. He believes that China has come to a true structural turning point, where the inefficiencies of a government-led growth model hurt the economy.“As China has exhausted its surplus labour and western economies are in secular decline, exports won’t rise to cover up the inefficiencies any more,” he says.
In the short term, analysts are marshalling different numbers to argue that the Chinese economy, though slowing, is performing in line with its potential; or, on the contrary, to argue that the slowdown has taken it below potential.
Helen Qiao, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, said a range of indicators such as falling corporate profits and a sharp drop in inflation point to below-potential growth.
“These are all signs of a negative output gap, which calls for policy adjustment,” she wrote in a report. “The potential growth level remains at around 8.5 per cent for 2012.”
The concept of potential growth refers to the rate of expansion that is just right for an economy: not so fast as to cause high inflation, nor so slow as to lead to high unemployment.
It is by that latter metric – unemployment – that many other analysts believe China’s slowdown is only natural.
Although the labour market has started to come under stress, there has not been nearly as many job losses as in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis. This suggests that the economy simply does not need to grow as quickly as it did a few years ago to generate jobs for all those moving off of farms and into cities.
“It’s not like if you get this slowdown in growth there’s some kind of huge Armageddon in unemployment around the corner,” says Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Dragonomics, a research firm.
Demographic change is the main factor behind this. China’s working-age population has been growing much more slowly over the past five years and it is set to peak in 2015.
But potential growth is not only determined by demographics. It is also about productivity: just how much is each worker actually making.
Hence the focus on China’s once-in-a-decade leadership succession that is set to take place next month. The country’s future growth path, far from being set in stone, will be shaped by policy choices in Beijing.
As Mr Qu of HSBC cautions, the bullish case is based on a big assumption: that China will continue its 30-year-long march towards a more market-driven economy. “The success of these reforms holds the key to sustained productivity growth,” he says.
Un abrazo,
PD1: A ver si de una puñetera vez le ganamos algo a las bolsas emergentes. Desde UBS dicen (te adjunto un pdf con 29 páginas muy interesantes):
Next: The Great Recoupling
The chart below from UBS' George Magnus captures perhaps better than anything, not only the reason why the global economy grew with the speed it did over the past 40 years, not only why "globalization" (a/k/a finding news places to issue debt in exchange for secured assets and unsecured cash flows all the while under the umbrella of globalist organizations: see Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) was the primary urgency for the status quo, not only why the developed world managed to delay the inevitable day of reckoning for as long as it did, but most importantly, why the global day of debt-saturated reckoning is coming.
Because after decades of letting the developing world (a place which Goldman was nice enough to even give it its own special name successfully with the BRICs, and not so successfully with the N-11) carry the heavy burden of new debt creation, which by now should be clear to all is the only driver for global "growth", said developing world is now full to the brim with debt, and can do no more (the question of whether Africa as the last bastion of secured and unsecured leverage and can carry the weight of all other insolvent continents on its shoulders remains to be answered).
It also means that first slowly, then very fast, the "Asian economies" will rapidly recouple with the "advanced" ones, but instead of meet in the middle, the orange will chase the yellow one all the way down, down, down.
There are two possibilities as to what happens then, one of which is good, the other not so good. Both are the topic of the latest analysis by UBS' George Magnus titled "Asia: is the miracle over?" which is a must read for anyone who wishes to know what happens next in Asia, and thus, in the world.
Magnus' conclusion:
One way or another, China is going to rebalance. The question is whether it occurs in an orderly fashion with the investment side of the economy slowing to a rate less than the growth in GDP, but still growing. Or whether it happens in the context of a sharp decline in investment, with more alarming economic and political consequences that will cut across the economy.
After two decades of unparalleled economic success, we believe China now needs a reform programme on a scale similar to that adopted 30 years ago. Without it, a heavily investment-centric and credit-intensive economic model could soon become unstable, and later stall in a middle income trap. There’s only so much labour transfer from rural areas to urban factories. There’s a limit to how high the investment share of GDP can go. Rapid population ageing is chipping away at Chinese growth. The exceptional impact of accession to the WTO a decade ago is fading. And the significant, direct role of the government, state banks and SOEs in the economy as agents of economic policy, and owners and providers of heavy investment and infrastructure may no longer be appropriate as the economy becomes richer, more complex, and in need of greater competition and innovation.
In our view, the bottom line about reform is whether the CPC is willing and able to do three fundamental things. First, we feel it should move towards a fuller market economy, changing the legacy role of the state. Second, it should allow power to drain from itself, regional governments, state entities and the military towards the private sector and households. And third, it should introduce rules and transparency, including adoption of the rule of law, into the overall system of governance.
You can be optimistic or pessimistic about the outcomes, but you can’t speak of the China or, by implication Asia, miracle nowadays, without considering the chances of successful political and institutional reforms. More to the point, perhaps, what would the consequences be for China if, for existential reasons, the CPC wasn’t willing or able to go down this path?
Full report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/105522015/Asia-is-the-Miracle-Over-George-Magnus-UBS
PD2: Gráficos de la evolución del PIB largos en el tiempo:
2050 Years Of Global GDP History
The chart below shows 2050 years of relative global GDP, during which there was a surprisingly flat distribution of the major economic powers: China, India, and the "West", at least until the mid-1800s, when the "Western" Golden Age began primarily courtesy of the industrial revolution, followed by the arrival of the Fed and virtually endless leverage (i.e., borrowing from the future until such time as no more debt capacity remains at either the public or private sectors), only to end in the late 1900s when the marginal balance of power shifted back to Asia, which became the next nexus of debt accumulation (see our earlier post on The Great Recoupling for some additional perspectives).
And while the chart, from Deutsche Bank and PWC, attempts to predict the next 40 years of relative GDP distribution by eventually regressing back to the the long-term trendline, we feel that this is quite an optimistic assumption for a world in which virtually every "developed" country is insolvent, begs for China to ease whenever western inflation sends gas prices soaring making reelection of the incumbent impossible, and is reliant on the indefinite continuation of the USD's reserve status to preserve the last traces of western superiority (not to mention cheap funding of $-trillion deficits as far as the eye can see).
PD3: Estimaciones de la población URBANA china: Tu ves chinorris, yo veo consumidores… y mano de obra barata, muy barata.
PD4: Ayer triste día 11/9. Mira lo que ha pasado después de 11 largos años…y parece que fue hace poco. No, el tiempo es implacable y nos maltrata:
PD5: Los “ni ni” crecen. No tienen nada que hacer, salvo tocarse las napias y juguetear con el móvil. Gracias a que las familias los acogen, pero qué hartitos deben andar los padres. ¿Cuál es el origen de los ni-nis? No tengo una idea exacta, debe haber muchos factores. Pero los padres tenemos mucha culpa de no haberles estimulado lo suficiente. Quizás nos hemos dedicado más a nosotros y menos a ellos. Quizás el ejemplo nuestro no fue bueno. Quizás sus amigos no fueron los apropiados, quizás no hablamos con ellos lo suficiente. No tengo ni idea, pero apuesto por esto último… Hablar, hablar, siempre hablar…, que nos copian, que nos escuchan, que pensarán que somos unos carrozas, o unos inútiles, o unos viejos, pero nos oyen. Y sobre todo, paciencia, paciencia y mucha paciencia. Pero hay que actuar, hay que motivar, hay que estimular. Mala enseñanza es la de aquellos padres que por miedo a la relación con sus hijos no se atreven a corregirles, a educarles, a animarles a que vayan por la buena dirección…, joder que somos sus padres y tenemos que ayudarles, que no podemos dejar pasar una ocasión sin dar ánimo o corregir las cosas negativas!!! No podemos ser colegas de los nenes, si no, está el riesgo de que acaben como estos ni-nis que te cuento. Y la solución es maleta y manta, al extranjero. Ha sido así siempre, y ahora otra vez…
