哈哈，这个图有意思，确实碉堡了。d ang国意志vs经济规律顺道转一个老外对中国近期股市的分析
http://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/3bqovg/nonsensationalist_explanation_of_the_chinese/I’m an analyst for a Western financial firm, in short my job’s to explain how Chinese government policy affects the stock market. There's been a ton of news on the subject recently which has led in turn to a significant amount of ill-informed opinion-giving on this subreddit. I figure someone should really clarify what’s going on so we can all be better informed in our anti-Chinese rhetoric. I’ll try not to bore you with too many unnecessary details and I’m writing off the top of my head so you’ll forgive any rambling off-point stuff.
Professional or otherwise, there’s no such thing as an objective fact when it comes to finance, as markets represent the collective opinions of investors, and we are all intimately familiar with the casual relationship an opinion has with facts. Take everything I say with a grain of salt and consider your own preconceptions when forming an opinion.
So here’s essentially what happened: unlike, say, the Americans, the Chinese by and large tend to save more money than they spend, leading to a large pileup in liquidity as the average dude parks most of his money in a bank account and forgets about it, usually until there’s enough there to buy some big-ticket items like a house. In fact, until recently, it was almost always property: during the China development boom of the past decade-ish when everything was growing in double digits and the Middle Kingdom was sucking up every commodity readily available in order to build up billions of dollars in infrastructure, property was making people millionaires and everyone wanted to get in the game.
As the Chinese economy has been slowing over the past several years, people aren’t making as much money as they used to. This is bad for the Party, whose mandate essentially boils down to “Trust us to guide China, and we’ll make sure you have a roof over your head, food on your plate and a steady job.” So in order to keep its populace happy while it works on fixing the poor fundamentals within its economy (lots of bad debt, significant market inefficiencies, corruption, think of it as all the gunk that builds up in a long-running machine), the Party encouraged its people to invest in the stock markets. Bread and circuses and all that. They did this through supportive financing policies and encouraging headlines in state media (there was a front-page People’s Daily article that was literally entitled “Go! Go! Buy Stocks!”). Now, here’s the thing: the Chinese people aren’t stupid. They know that assets are overvalued. While the they might not have faith in the fundamentals of their equity market, they do have faith in the Communist Party’s ability to Get Shit Done – ie if the Chinese government says something is going to go up, they will do everything in their power to make sure it goes up. So everyone takes their money and drops it in the stock market. Low and behold, everything goes up, and people are happy.
Markets are built on faith. For most western equity markets, you place your faith in a bottom-up structure: your faith is mostly in the individual companies you choose to invest in rather than overall market factors. For the average Chinese investor, however, the faith is top-down, placed in Party diktat. We foreigners tend to view that faith as misplaced because of our socioeconomic preconceptions. Whether or not these are valid are up to you to decide and I’m not here to make an argument either way.
So back to the narrative. The Laobaixin are investing in the markets, usually by following headlines in local media. These retail investors are short-sighted and are investing on momentum and media attention without really paying attention to the actual economics that underpin the company, because if the government wants a sector to do well they will continue pouring money into the sector until it does well, regardless of corporate inefficiencies. In short, Grandpa Wang doesn’t really consider the risk inherent in equity investing.
This is bad, and not what the government wants. They’re trying to engineer a slow-burning, multi-year gradual bull market. Instead, everyone’s piling all the money they’ve got in and trusting that the government will bail out if things get too bad. They’re also –and this is unusual -- borrowing a decent chunk of money to try and enhance their gains, which is further driving the markets into overdrive.
Now the government is in a really nasty bind. Remember that their primary goal is social stability. Until recently, the Chinese stock market has been mostly a playground for the rich, so they really didn’t care as much if some tuhou loses all his money in bad investments. When enough normal folk are invested, however, a market drop can directly lead to instability. Instability leads to discontent, discontent leads to protests, and we all know how the government feels about those. So unlike previous market dips, the government is really doing everything it can to keep the market from dropping too heavily. That said, they need to make sure that their citizenry understands that the markets are not risk-free. It’s a very delicate balancing act that they’re trying to strike, and that’s what’s causing all the recent volatility. Yes there’s a bit of a bubble but it’s not as serious as most headlines are making it out to be; Chinese debt is significant on a local government level but there are plenty of tools in the central gov’ts arsenal to manage the economy, including bank RRR rates, significant foreign holdings and direct control over market factors. This is not the end of the world, China will not collapse, the government is still in control.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions on the subject to the best of my ability...
Show Posts
