Here’s a weekend ‘commentary’ item from ‘MoneyBeat’ in the Wall Street Journal:

  • optimism (on the Chinese economy stabilizing) is premature, and not only because of the perpetual suspicion surrounding the accuracy of China’s statistics
  • China still has to work through tens of millions of square feet of unoccupied apartment space and hundreds of billions of dollars of unused factory capacity, most of it debt-financed
  • Data outside of China are flashing warning signals
  • ” caution for investors who have revived bets on the Australian dollar” … Mitsubishi UFJ economist Brendan Brown points to the Baltic Dry Index of bulk shipping costs for raw materials, which is down 35% from a year earlier and at its lowest level in 18 months. While that in part reflects a glut of shipping capacity left over from the 2008 global crisis, it is also a sign of weak Chinese demand for commodities
  • Says China achieving 7.5% growth while “powering down steel plants and letting copper stockpiles build up” with debt
  • Loans increasing twice as fast as the economy—and those numbers exclude a so-called shadow-banking lending system estimated at more than $5 trillion, or 80% of gross domestic product

There is more at the link, its an ungated article: Chinese Data Don’t Add Up