Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Chinese stocks saying this about their economy

Look, the fact is simply that Chinese stocks have been just about the worst performing stocks since 2006. Now analysts will dismiss that and say everything is prefect in China, but the stock market does not seem to believe everything that the government is saying about the economy. And clearly there are strength signs in the Chinese economy. In particular, as I said, we have this huge explosion of debt. Debt as a percent of GDP has increased in the last five years by more than 50 percent. Total debt is now over 215 percent of GDP, and a lot of it is trade finance that is being rolled over.

In addition to that, there are lots of funny deals. A friend of mine who analyzes China very carefully, Simon Hunt (ph), he pointed out that trade finance between one state-owned enterprise and a private company has amounted to over $5 trillion by continuing to roll over the same collateral several times. There's lots of funny things that are happening in China. And when the whole thing unwinds it will be a disaster.

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