Summary Starting with a registered capital of Rmb10mn, HNA Group has grown its total assets to more than Rmb1trn. In just the past three years, the Group completed acquisitions valued at more than US$40bn. The most frequently asked question now is: where did HNA obtain its capital? Recent articles (see Financial Times, June 2, 2017) […]
Summary Bond Defaults in China SOEs are not protected In 2016, there were defaults of 79 Chinese bonds for a total value of Rmb40.3 billion. This was an increase of 243% YoY. We draw several conclusions from default data on future economic policy and how the leadership will handle rising debt: 1) The MostDefaults were […]
China’s Financial Summit The Leadership Meets Hard Reality On Friday and Saturday July 14 and 15, Beijing will hold a key financial meeting, that is expected to be attended by President Xi Jinping. This may be China’s most import economic planning meeting in several years as it will be a test of Beijing’s ability to […]
July 12, 2017 — 10:39 AM HKT Andrew Collier, Managing Director, Orient Capital Research spoke with Doug Krizner and Juliette Saly on the on PBOC’s official newspaper saying China should expand the yuan’s trading band. He sees a lot of downward pressure on the yuan. He also looked at the flurry of M&A activity seen […]
Bad Economic Benchmarks in China Why Shadow Flows are a Better Indication of the Economy’s Strength than Official Data Summary A fund manager recently told me he relies on three sets of data to monitor the strength of the Chinese economy: Interbank interest rates. The value of the yuan. The rise or decline of China’s […]
Zheshang Bank How Chinese Banks Accelerate Risks We have long maintained that the smaller Chinese banks have the highest risk profiles. This is due to their aggressive expansion of their balance sheets using risky sources of capital, along with their reliance on a much smaller market with less opportunity to spread the risk geographically. Zheshang […]
Summary The weak link in China’s financialized economy is the country’s Wealth Management Products. They are short in duration, widely sold by formal and informal institutions, and are invested in important institutions including corporate bonds and smaller banks. We think a run on WMPs is quite likely as banks face a rising inability to pay […]
False Dawn in China’s Economy Analysts Jump too Quickly on News out of the National People’s Congress The economic news out of China recently has drawn glowingChina’s industrial output in January and February rose 6.3 per cent compared with the same period a year ago and fixed-asset investment strengthened to 8.9 per cent in the […]
Summary
One of the likely outcomes of China’s rising debt will be a shortage of liquidity for more remote geographic regions, along with corporates with little access to the power centers in Beijing. One short-term solution is the debt-for-equity swap program, which is allowing local SOEs to place the debt in the banks in the form of equity, and permitting these firms to continue to borrow from the banks. This is one tool that is keeping local governments — and their ailing state firms – alive.
However, although this program has come from Beijing, the leadership has been reluctant to allow local governments full control over the swap as it encourages continued waste of capital in inefficient, older industries. It may use political methods – the anti-corruption campaign – for fiscal ends.
Qualcomm-NXP and China Chinese Opposition Unlikely Merger between Qualcomm and NXP We think this is a win-win deal between NXP and Qualcomm, providing more upside for Qualcomm. On the one hand, Qualcomm is seizing the burgeoning automotive market and IoT (Internet of Things), which is expected to bring economic scale and client loyalty in the […]