First it was the government’s miraculous ability to deliver on-target GDP growth that got the permabulls bellowing again, then it was the striking (world-beating, one might even say), 12% currency-adjusted rally in its stock market that got them triumphantly pawing the ground. Nor did the drop in interest rates serve in any way to dampen the eternal hope that China was once again deferring meaningful structural reform in the face of a threat to near-term output.
Quite what was actually behind the equity rally is not easy to say. There were whispers that the Russians (who else?) were piling in, now that their assets were subject to arbitrary seizure as part of Nova Roma’s vilification of their leader and proxy war against their homeland. There was also talk that the imminent linkage of the Shanghai and HK bourses was driving an arbitrage between the unusually-discounted mainland A-shares and their offshore H-share equivalents. Finally, in a typically neat piece of circular reasoning, the imminent rebound in the economy which we have even seen some brave (or foolhardy, according to preference) souls project at a startling 8.5% (sic) early next year was held to be at work to push up what was an otherwise under-owned and thus optically ‘cheap’ emerging market.
On the face of it, news that, over the first seven months of the year, the increase in SOE earnings had accelerated from June’s 8.9% YOY to July’s 9.2% – well up on the first quarter’s paltry 3.3% pace – may have seemed to have offered some much-needed confirmation of this optimistic thesis. However, a closer glance at the figures would not have proven quite so reassuring, had anyone bothered to actually take one.
Over the past, supposedly brighter three months, revenues advanced a modest 6.2% compared to the like period in 2013, though with as-reported profits up an ostensibly more creditable 12.1%. There, all grounds for positive spin, alas, were exhausted. For one, operating profits were, in fact, only up 4.0% like-for-like (a wide discrepancy which can only excite suspicion as to the nature of the headline surplus) while financing costs vaulted a fifth higher.
Worse still, in eking out even this degree of improvement since May, liabilities have soared by an incredible CNY2.320 trillion (around $125 billion a month) – an increment fully half as big again as that registered twelve months ago and a sum which is actually greater than the entire reported sum of ‘total social finance’ over the trimester (that latter ‘only’ managed CNY 2.240 trillion after last month’s thoroughly unexpected swoon).
And what did our proud commanders of the economic heights achieve for shouldering such a hefty weight of obligations? An addition to revenues of CNY719 billion (extra debt to extra ‘sales’ therefore coming in at a ratio of 3.2:1); a pick-up in ‘profit’ of CNY76 billion (d[Debt]:d[Income] = 30:1); and a blip up in operating profit of just CNY16 billion (at a truly staggering ratio of 144 to 1).
Reversing these latter relationships, we can see that while swallowing up all of the nation’s available new credit since the spring, China’s SOEs added 31 fen per one renminbi in sales, 3.3 fen in reported profit, and a bare 0.7 fen in the operating version of income. Just the sort of performance on which to base expectations of a significant coming rise in growth and prosperity!
Armed with such an underwhelming use of resources – both physical and financial – it is perhaps no wonder that MIIT is again trying to shut down swathes of superfluous capacity, issuing what are effectively cease-and-desist orders against 132 firms in a whole range of heavy industries – iron, steel, coke, ferroalloy, calcium carbide, aluminium, copper and lead smelting, cement, flat glass, paper, leather, printing and dyeing, chemical fibres, and lead-acid batteries. Shipbuilding may not be far behind, either, given that it formed the main topic of discussion at a meeting of the National Committee of the CPPCC this week.
The language used was, in some cases, pretty uncompromising, too: “Total industrial capacity in cement and plate glass is still growing, but the industry-wide sales rate is in decline and accounts receivable are increasing… there are to be no new projects in the sector for any reason,” thundered the MIIT communique.
This time around, given Chairman Xi’s rigorous ‘anti-corruption’ campaign, there might well be a little less of the back-sliding and wilful defiance which has greeted such edicts in the past. The emperor is no longer quite so fare away, nor the mountain quite so high, if you are a recalcitrant local cadre these days!
Even before this, the signs were there for those with eyes to see. Despite the much-bruited pick-up in activity, Chinese power use, excluding the residential component, SLOWED to 4.5% YOY in the three months to July from 8.1% in the preceding three months. Nor did this come without a significant deceleration in so-called ‘tertiary’ industry sector (loosely, that encompassing services and light indstry) which is henceforth supposed to be the torchbearer for growth and employment. Here, consumption dropped from the spring’s 10%-plus rates to just 7.4% YOY last month. Added buring of lights and turning of lathes in the secondary industry category – essentially manufacturing – was a tardy 4.2% even though growth in industrial production, we were told, had averaged 9.0% in that same period.
Hmmmm. No wonder the PMI seems to be shedding some of its recent, rather inexplicable exuberance.
Round and round the circle of vicious consequences swirls. As Wang Xianzheng, President of the China Coal Industry Association, admitted: ‘Currently, more than 50 percent of enterprises are in payment arrears and have delayed paying wages.’ Of 26 large companies spread across nine provinces, he revealed that 20 are making losses, only 9 are still in the black, and the remainder are hovering uneasily between (commercial) life and death.
Other obvious signs of distress are to be had among the loan guarantee networks which had everywhere come into being with the then-laudable aim of persuading constitutionally reluctant banks to lend to customers other than SOEs when times were good. Now trapped in flagging businesses which are more correlated than perhaps the participants had realised – and often having succumbed to the diversion of funds to less commendable ends in the interim – they are all going sour together and the same interconnectedness which was once their mainstay is proving instead a sheet anchor with which to drag them all under.
As Zhou Dewen, president of Zhejiang Federation of Private Enterprise Investment, told the Global Times, the rash of bankruptcies in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces has disrupted production and led to lay-offs, with 80% of all sour loans in the area associated with such mutual guarantee schemes. So elevated is the level of distrust, as bad debts have risen at an annualized 30% pace this year, that banks are now trying to call loans in early and obtaining court orders to freeze the assets of those firms that are unable to comply with their demands.
The banks themselves are beginning to accelerate write-offs dramatically – even though the official NPL ratios still look woefully understated. They are also drawing heavily upon the markets in order to bolster their capital as a precaution. As the WSJ reported, the four largest state-owned lenders have started raising a planned $73 billion in debt and equity this year – a call which is expected to jump to more than $300bn in the next five years, according to the banking regulator.
In addition, five local governments in the south and east of the country are setting up so-called ‘asset-management companies’ – effectively state-sponsored ‘bad banks’ – in a mirror of the system used by Zhu Rongji in the 1990s to shuffle the more toxic stuff off its originators’ balance sheets and thus allow them to continue to lend while the bitter fruits of their previous mistakes were hidden away elsewhere.
Though this only disguises and does not in any way alleviate the economic waste spawned by the boom, it might at least allow banks to issue new equity-like capital – perhaps to the insurers who are themselves being heavily promoted by Beijing as the next battalion of systemic saviours – at above notional book value and hence to enable them to remain a viable source of new credit. Note that the last time this was done, the losses were essentially fiscalized: banks simply swapped the bad loans on their books for what have since proven to be irredeemable – but nonetheless fully par-valued – loans to the state entities which, in turn, financed the obliging AMCs. Balance sheets will not shrink, therefore, only become sanitised, by the operation of this mechanism.
Here, however, is where it all gets fraught once more, because the same local governments who are being marshalled to assume the banks’ bad debts (many of them ensuing from extending credit to LGFPs) are themselves becoming desperate for funds given that all too many of their own, sure-fire investment gambits are turning out to be the dampest of damp squibs.
As the Economic Information Daily reported, an audit of 448 eastern township platform companies found that two-fifths of them were curently loss making, while a further thirty percent barely broke even. With these bodies so heavily dependent on land sales to generate the revenues needed to cover their current outlays, much less their ambitious capital expansion plans and ongoing debt service costs – and with such ‘sales’ only being possible in large part if the authorities extend the credit to the purchasers in the first place – a decidedly negative feedback loop has begun to tighten around their necks as the property market itself enters a slump.
Indeed, according to research conducted by brokerage company Centaline Property Agency, twenty major developers have between them spent CNY182.5 billion yuan so far this year to purchase new sites – a drastic 38% down on the like period last year.
‘Worsening property sales have undercut the willingness of developers to buy land. Their focus now is on raising cash from the sales of what they’ve already built. Few are in the mood to buy more,’ said Zhang Dawei who headed up the company’s research team.
In July alone, aggregate land sales revenue for 300 Chinese cities was off by a half from the same month in 2013, as reported by the China Index Academy. Sales in the four largest cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen – normally a slam-dunk – sank by a staggering 70%.
‘The downturn means that the scale of land sales for the remainder of this year could continue to contract. Developers have pushed the “conservative” button,’ said Zhang with commendable understatement.
And quite right, too, as anecdotal evidence grows that formerly avid house-buyers are beginning to adopt that age-old American practice of ‘jingle mail’ – that is, they are simply walking away from properties they either cannot afford or do not believe will again appreciate in price.
At one end of the scale, one Nanjing online estate agent recorded a growing back-log of such defalcations and referred to the ‘unspeakable pain’ in the local market – an agony apparently shared in at least six other of the districts neighbouring his.
Despite the widespread belief that Chinese buyers are sitting on a typical equity cushion of 30-40% of the property value – and hence, unlike their less well-endowed US, Irish, and Spanish cousins, are impervious to all bar the most extreme events in the market – the scary truth is that much of the real estate to which they do hold title has been, how shall we say, ‘rehypothecated’ – i.e., pledged as collateral for a range of business loans as well as for the more speculative use of funds.
‘In the past few years, many small business owners blindly invested in real estate, mining and other industries. These industries are now suffering from overcapacity and falling asset prices, so business owners are unable to pay their debts,’ said one general manager of a Wenzhou microfinance company.
‘Many [of these] use the house as collateral when business loans go wrong,‘ Ge Ningbo, a county bank manager, told a journalist.
To get a feel for the scale of the problem, consider press reports that in Wenzhou, 1,000 homes were abandoned as a result of the decline, homes with an ostensible market value of more than Y6.4 Billion – or roughly $1 million a pop! No scrabbling rural migrants, these, but possibly members of an increasingly scrutiny–shy party apparatus! Clearly, the banks will need to suck in even more money from their gullible preference shareholders if this phenomenon starts to spread and, in the meanwhile, it is hard to see how they will be empowered to make sufficient revenue-positive new loans to keep the whirligig in motion in such a climate of confusion and disabusal.
Sadly, we have not finished our tale of woe there because there are also stories circulating in the official media that those same local governments, who are in many ways the lynchpins of the whole merry-go-round, may be far deeper into the mire than has been recognised to date.
As the articles detail, a member of the relevant NPC standing committee confided to a press contact that when hidden liabilities are taken into account alongside those uncovered in a recent audit, the true total of LG debt almost doubles to a wince-inducing Y30 trillion. Just for sheer size – some 50% of national GDP – this would be a matter of concern, but it also should not be overlooked that far too much of that monstrous total is comprised of short-term obligations against which are held long-term, illiquid, and often economically redundant ‘assets’.
Given that the last NAO study showed that are some 3,700 governmental bodies across various categories which had debts in excess of 100% of their local GDP, something patently needs to be done if the mad Chinese juggler is to keep his profusion of balls bobbing in the air.
So, welcome to local scrip issues. Yes, it seems that ingenious local cadres have dusted off their depression-era news clippings and revisited the age of the mediaeval mint and simply started using their own IOUs as media of exchange wherever their writ may run.
Economic Information Daily reported that in Hubei, Hunan and Guangdong, among others, government IOUs have become a ‘discount currency.’ In fact, commentary on Caijing suggests that not only are even small, rural communities now doing likewise, but that some companies, too, are paying their workers in scrip – just as in the early days of the Western factory age when resort by employers to what was called the ‘truck’ or ‘Tommy’ system was widespread.
As the early 19th century English radical, William Cobbett noted, ‘… when this tommy system… makes its appearance where money has for ages been the medium of exchange, and of payments for labour; when this system makes its appearance in such a state of society, there is something wrong; things are out of joint; and it becomes us to inquire into the real cause of its being resorted to…’
His answer? The state of economic depression brought about by the costs imposed upon entrepreneurs by the dead-weight of government:-
‘It is not the fault of the masters, who can have no pleasure in making profit in this way: it is the fault of the taxes, which, by lowering the [net] price of their goods, have compelled them to resort to this means of diminishing their expenses, or to quit their business altogether, which a great part of them cannot do without being left without a penny… Everything was on the decline… I was assured that shop-keepers in general did not now sell half the quantity of goods in a month that they did in that space of time four or five years ago… need we then wonder that the iron in Staffordshire has fallen, within these five years, from thirteen pounds to five pounds a ton [metal-bashers were similarly bearing the brunt, it appears]… and need we wonder that the iron-masters, who have the same rent and taxes to pay that they had to pay before, have resorted to the tommy system, in order to assist in saving themselves from ruin!’
‘Here is the real cause of the tommy system; and if [we wish] to put an end to it… prevail upon the Parliament to take off taxes to the amount of forty millions a year.’
Caijing devoted quite some space to ‘netizen’ comments on this state of affairs, several of which reflected a considerable degree of awareness that this had come about because of the unbridled spending and lavish self-indulgence of the relevant officials, while some were also aware that such an emission of fiat money was a direct parallel of the official money-creation process and further that it could only persist for so long as some minimal degree of trust resided in the councils’ ability one day to redeem the claims. Moreover, it was noted that since people ultimately expect the discount between township paper and that issued by the PBOC to widen, they were using the former preferentially to buy and sell and clinging on to the latter – a classic, Gresham’s Law example of bad money driving out good.
If the localities are in such dire straits as these, then it is hard to resist the temptation to believe that we are approaching some sort of end-game. But what, we should ask ourselves, might be the trigger for its no-doubt jarring denouement?
Well, here we come full circle with the latest act of Xi Jinping’s grand ‘anti-corruption’ drive. For, as well as Our Glorious Leader’s insistence at last week’s Leading Group get-together that everyone must ‘truly push forward reform with real guns and knives’ (ulp!), news has come out that the National Audit Commission will next conduct a full, ‘rigorous’ check of all land sales and related transactions carried out between 2008-13 and that, moreover, the results will be to hand when the top men convene for their next Plenum this coming October.
One can only imagine the consternation in the ranks which this announcement has unleashed. After all, there is unlikely to be overmuch evidence that any of these deals were conducted transparently, competitively, honestly, and legally, in the absence of any and all inducements, kickbacks, or displays of favouritism, not only since such was the accepted practice during the reign of Wen and Hu – especially during the infamous, no questions asked, frenzy of post-Crash stimulus – but also because this is a sphere notoriously subject to peculation in what we fondly imagine to be our more enlightened polities, too.
We can therefore not only expect the bodycount to rise substantially as officials fearful of censure seek to avoid their imminent disgrace and subsequent punishment, but we should also be prepared for the possibility that when this most capacious of all cylindrical metallic containers of vermiform invertebrae is opened, it will be accompanied by a blast of sufficient megatonnage to bring the whole flawed edifice crashing to the ground.
Under such circumstances, we find it very hard to shake off the presentiment that, on the one side, some commentators’ touching faith in an incipient re-acceleration are horribly misplaced while, on the other, the tired old ‘Goldilocks’ scenario whereby all bad news is good because it presages the launch of another round of sustained, indiscriminate ‘stimulus’ seems equally out of key with what Xi tells us he is trying to achieve.
Having dealt at such length with China, let us try and dispose of the rest of the globe in as short a space as possible.
Japan: Abenomics is still a horrible failure as drooping machine orders, frozen store sales, and exports back at 4 ½ year (currency-adjusted), one-quarter-from-the-peak lows reveal. So, guess what? As the PM’s approval ratings slip, another ‘stimulus’ package is said to be in the offing (sigh!)
Europe: Even one of Hollande’s own ministers confided to the press a couple of weeks back, ‘the truth is, he thinks we don’t have a chance’ – who are we to disagree? Meanwhile, the chap at the head of the other Sick Man, Matteo Renzi, has undergone a moment of almost Caligulan delusion, assuring supporters that the hour had come for Italy ‘to tow Europe out of the crisis’ and ‘to assume… the leadership’ of the Continent.
And what of his first steps to make good on such a vaunting claim? Why, in an Onion-like act of farce, to insist that ISTAT no longer releases the GDP numbers a week ahead of its peers and thereby afford underemployed analysts and commentators more opportunity to be critical of the country’s performance! And then there’s the Neocon-inspired catastrophe unfolding on the bloc’s eastern fringe from which the emergence of a bout of renewed economic difficulty is the very least of our worries.
USA: Chairperson Yellen is currently holding court at Jackson Hole as the US numbers continue their rebound from the winter’s retardation. What a moment for her to take the stage. Non-financials (large cap-led) are at new records, Tech at new, post-Bubble highs; junk spreads have narrowed sharply; vol has again crashed, correlations fallen, and put-call ratios evaporated. With the Bund-UST spread at a 15-year high and equities outperforming, the USD stands on the verge of a break out and up from what is already its best level in a year. The cycle is still running in favour of the States on a comparison basis, no matter how ninety-Nth percentile many of its valuations are when considered in isolation.
With money supply still swelling rapidly – and amid hints that it is being more actively utilised than of late—it is hard to see quite what will bring that run to an end in the near term. Were we to really be critical, one of the few clouds ‘no bigger than a man’s hand’ is that the growth of both inventories and payroll expenses are outstripping sales in the durable goods sector. Thus, while US assets are hardly ‘investible’ in the Benjamin Graham sense, they are also a tough short in the Sell’em Ben Smith one.
Britain: While MPC member David Miles saw fit to describe the EU as ‘dead in the water’ as a trade partner, closer to home some of the gloss is finally coming off the reputation of one of the country’s most expensive recent imports, its egregious Bank governor.
No doubt, dear reader, you too were shocked – shocked! – to hear local Tory Mark Field, the Honourable Member for the Cities of London and Westminster, opine to his mates in Grub Street that “…from the moment Mark Carney became governor in July 2013, it was pretty clear forward guidance was an indication rates would not rise this side of the election – for all the talk of Bank of England independence, there was a clear bargain between him and George Osborne.” Be that as it may, it is surely not too cynical to note that Fred Carney’s Army will not want to contibute to a possible defeat by Alex the Bruce’s forces in the coming Scottish independence vote.
You can just hear it now, that ringing oration:-
‘Aye, vote ‘Yes’ and interest rates may rise. Vote ‘No’ and they’ll stay as is … at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our neighbours that they may take our pound and their nuclear subs, but they’ll never take… OUR FREEDOM!
Commodity Corner
Truth be told, it has not been the kindest of summers for commodities. Since reaching their late June peak, returns have suffered a 7.5% slump to touch six month lows even as US equities have added 2%. For the record, in that crumbling eight week stretch EM stocks put on 4.7%, US bonds were up 1% and junk was flat.
Within commodities themselves, what some commentators have been calling a ‘Garden of Eden’ summer in the US grain belt has ensured that the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye almost everywhere you look, while oilseeds and wheat have been similarly profuse. A loss of 11.3% and, in fact, the casting into jeopardy of the entire cyclical bull market in prices has been the result.
Energy, too, has suffered, as the record longs in oil finally began to liquidate, triggering the biggest 6-week sell-off of positions in WTI on record. IN notional value terms, net spec longs in Brent and WTI combined crashed from close to $97 billion worth of contracts to $59 billion. It is possible to read the charts to declare that this swoon has violated the uptrend in place for the last five years, as well as breaking all major MAs. Against that, we are arguably a touch oversold and the last four years’ sideways stationary, Arab Spring range remains intact. Tacticians, Faites vos jeux!
Dollar strength, the subsidence of financial market anxieties alluded to above, and the cessation of labour unrest in SA have hardly been conducive to higher PM prices (palladium — and Russia—excepted). Gold has also broken 200, 100, 50-day MAs and is threatening the uptrend drawn from the June 30-Dec 31 $1180 double bottom and June 3rd’s $1240 probe. Lease rates remain positive and net specs—at 43% of total O/I – as long as they have been on average throughout the last 12 years’ bull market.
Only Base metals seem to offer any hope (they rallied 4.2% while everything else was collapsing). Strength has partly been predicated upon what we think are decidedly ephemeral signs of a Chinese renaissance, but also on evidence of dwindling stockpiles and the litany of capex cuts and asset disposals emanating from the mining industry. They appear, therefore, to offer the least dirty shirt in the laundry basket.
