China Post Pandemic Economy - Not Good
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When China lost even Ray Dalio, you know Asia’s biggest economy has got some serious troubles ahead.
For the record, the billionaire Bridgewater founder, one of the biggest China bulls anywhere, hasn’t given up on the place. But as Dalio told Bloomberg in Singapore this week, “there are real issues” with China’s $17 trillion economy amid a deepening slowdown.
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Again, Dalio hasn’t fled China. But the fact that the founder of the globe’s biggest hedge fund is raising warning flags matters.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2024/10/03/chinese-ev-firms-are-suffering-losses/
Beijing had made a big bet on electric vehicles (EV). But like so many other efforts of China’s centrally planned economy, things have not gone well. Intense price competition among China’s many EV producers as well as waning demand—both in China and abroad—have put manufacturers into financial trouble, with some reporting losses despite still considerable public support. Beijing has begun to step away from the effort, leaving local governments to pick up the subsidy slack. It is not a sustainable situation.
This now failing effort began more than five years ago. According to the MIT Technology Review, the raft of subsidies, tax breaks, procurement contracts, and other more oblique incentives to ramp up production and make China dominant has cost Beijing the equivalent of some $230 billion. The push eventually created a market for 13.1 million vehicles that accounted for 60% of EV ownership globally. Beijing also pushed for global sales of Chinese-made EVs. That effort made little headway in the United States even before Washington began to show increased levels of hostility toward China and Chinese products. The effort did, however, have considerable success in Europe.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/drewbernstein/2024/10/22/have-we-reached-peak-china/
Interesting article and kind of follows my thinking also.
Logan firmly believes that China’s growth has already peaked when defined as the country’s share of nominal global GDP, which he thinks is the most precise metric of its impact on the world’s economy. He also believes the deceleration was underway much earlier than most experts think.
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China unveils $1.4 trillion stimulus in effort to boost flailing economy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/08/china-economy-stimulus-package/
China on Friday announced a $1.4 trillion stimulus program to help local governments deal with debt, as Beijing grapples with a struggling economy and the possibility of a new trade war with the United States after Donald Trump’s election victory this week.
The highly anticipated announcement — the second stimulus package in six weeks — is an effort to bolster cash-strapped local governments, including those of cities and towns, but economists say the initiative will not be enough to address underlying issues and inject real momentum.
At the end of the week-long National People’s Congress on Friday, Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an unveiled a program to raise local government debt limits by $838 billion over three years, with an additional $559 billion available for local governments to tap over five years.
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https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-restaurants-race-bottom-deflation-hit-economy-2025-03-21/
Expanding domestic demand is the top priority this year for China's rulers, looking to offset the impact of U.S. tariffs and a protracted property crisis.
But consumer inflation fell in February at the quickest pace since January 2024, setting off concerns about a deflationary spiral.
Last year, An and his team dismantled 200 restaurants each month, or 270% more than the prior year, as the number of dissolved catering companies touched a historic high of almost 3 million nationwide, data from companies registry Qichacha shows.
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China's real estate sector has grappled with a deepening downturn for years. Now a shrinking population is casting another shadow over the stagnant property market.
Goldman Sachs estimates that demand for new homes in Chinese urban cities will remain suppressed at under 5 million units per year in the coming years — one fourth of the peak of 20 million units in 2017.
"Falling population and slowing urbanization suggest decreasing demographic demand for housing" in the coming years, Goldman Sachs economists said in a note Monday.
The country's population is estimated to fall to below 1.39 billion by 2035 from 1.41 billion, according to World Bank's latest data, said Tianchen Xu, senior economist at Economist Intelligence Unit, citing a combination of fewer newborns and more deaths from an ageing population.
China's population has been declining for the past three years, with the latest government data for 2024 showing it fell by 1.39 million from the prior year, as birth rates drop.
