Back in February, I published a video interview with Gary Shilling, president of A. Gary Shilling & Co., Inc. and author of the best selling book The Age of Deleveraging, in which he outlined why China’s economy is headed for a hard landing and what to do in order to profit from the slowdown.
Now Mr Shilling has returned with a five-part series of articles published in Bloomberg, in which he again outlines why China is headed for a ‘hard landing’. Below are some of the key extracts. The entire articles can be accessed from Bloomberg here: Part 1 ; Part 2 ; Part 3 ; Part 4 ; Part 5 .
Few countries are more important to the global economy than China. But its reputation as an unstoppable giant — as a country with an unending supply of cheap labor and limitless capacity for growth — masks some serious and worsening economic problems.
China’s labor force is aging. Its consumers save too much and spend too little. Its political and economic policy tools remain crude. Its state bureaucracy seems likely to curb spending just as exports weaken, and thus risks deflation. As U.S. consumers retrench, and as the global commodity bubble begins to dissipate, these fundamental weaknesses will combine in a way that’s unlikely to end well for China — or for the rest of the world…
…why do so many analysts predict that China can continue its robust growth?
In part because they believe in the misguided concept of global decoupling — the idea that even if the U.S. economy suffers a setback, the rest of the world, especially developing countries such as China and India, will continue to flourish. Recently — after China’s huge $586 billion stimulus program in 2009; massive imports of industrial materials such as iron ore and copper; booms in construction of cement, steel and power plants, and other industrial capacity; and a pickup in economic growth — the decoupling argument has been back in vogue.
This concept is flawed for a simple reason: Almost all developing countries depend on exports for growth, a point underscored by their persistent trade surpluses and the huge size of Asian exports relative to GDP. Further, the majority of exports by Asian countries go directly or indirectly to the U.S. We saw the effects of this starting in 2008: As U.S. consumers retrenched and global recession reigned, China and most other developing Asian countries suffered keenly.
Overconfidence in China’s ability to keep its economy booming is also partly psychological. It reminds me of the admiration and envy (even fear) that many felt toward Japan during its bubble days in the 1980s…
China has become an economic giant because it has so many people who are producing moderate amounts. In most ways, however, China remains an underdeveloped country with political and economic policy tools that are crude by Western standards. Those tools can spur impressive growth –but they also mask some deep structural weaknesses in China’s economy.
It’s relatively easy for developing countries to grow by emulating the technology of advanced nations or, in China’s case, by forcing them to share it as the price of doing business or by simply stealing it.
And a tightly controlled economy can get results quickly. That’s what happened with China’s $586 billion stimulus program introduced in 2009…
[But] this kind of growth is unsustainable, and it won’t be able to cover up China’s underlying vulnerabilities forever.
China’s reliance on exports and a controlled currency for growth, for instance, will no longer work if U.S. consumers are engaged in a chronic saving spree, as I believe they will be. Chinese export growth, which averaged 21 percent per year in the last decade, is bound to suffer.
The country’s seemingly inexhaustible pool of cheap labor is expected to peak in 2014, in part due to its rigid one-child policy. By some estimates, ample labor has boosted GDP growth by 1.8 percentage points annually since the late 1970s, but the contraction of the working-age population will reduce growth by 0.7 percentage points by 2030…
China is hoping to cool its white-hot economy without precipitating a recession. Doing so will be extremely difficult: Inflation fears are growing, the government’s ability to respond is quite limited, and China’s economic model, which leaves bureaucrats guessing about the market effects of their directives, is ultimately untenable.
Inflation worries start with housing. With Chinese exports curtailed by U.S. consumer retrenchment, capital spending threatened by government restraints and excess capacity, and domestic spending less than robust, housing has been China’s big generator of economic growth in recent years. By some estimates, half of Chinese GDP is linked to real-estate activity…
Developers are rushing to build while they try to support faltering prices by delaying completions and creating artificial shortages. Of course, these efforts are difficult to maintain because they tie up capital in uncompleted houses. Houses are now being built at about twice the rate they’re being sold, well above earlier norms…
A report this week by China’s National Audit Office found that a significant chunk of bank loans made to provincial-government financing vehicles were improperly funneled into property investments, contributing to a debt load equal to some 27 percent of GDP. Other huge loans to state-owned enterprises, intended to finance infrastructure, also reportedly went into real estate and may be at risk.
With inventories soaring while demand softens, and the government clamping down on speculation, a collapse of the housing bubble seems increasingly likely.
Housing isn’t the only area where signs of inflation are popping up. In May, consumer prices increased 5.5 percent versus a year earlier. In December, Chinese leaders agreed to “put stabilizing the overall price level in a more prominent position” in their ranking of economic priorities. In a country where many live at or below the poverty level, food costs are obviously a major concern, and they jumped 11.7 percent in May from a year earlier.
The government appears increasingly worried about social unrest. In November, it said it was ready to impose price controls to reduce inflation, especially on food and energy, and said it would help the poor with higher welfare payments. The unrest continues and, significantly, has moved from rural areas to the cities…
China’s ability to respond to these worries is extremely limited. The central bank relies on adjusting reserve requirements and limits on bank lending to implement monetary policy. Since January 2010, it has raised reserve requirements 12 times (to 21.5 percent), while only increasing the one-year lending rate four times (to 6.31 percent), to accommodate inefficient state-enterprise borrowers, which provide a lot of jobs.
Finally, implementing any policy in an economy that is partly government-controlled, partly market-driven is very difficult. In a completely controlled economy, as China’s used to be, government leaders might have made economically inefficient decisions, but their authority wasn’t disputed. In an open economy, as in Singapore, the markets make the decisions, and politicians have little involvement.
But under China’s current arrangement, officials making major decisions have to guess what market reactions will result, then try to mitigate the unintended consequences of their actions…
I suspect that such a hybrid market system is too unwieldy to allow the Chinese government to manage a soft landing for its economy. By my reckoning, the Federal Reserve has tried 12 times in the post-World War II era to cool an overheating economy without precipitating a recession. It succeeded only once. Can the politically controlled Chinese central bank, and the government leaders who really call the shots, be more successful than the independent Fed?
That seems unlikely. And the consequences, for China and the world economy, could be unfortunate…
Growth in the broadest measure of China’s money supply has declined from 30 percent year-over-year in December 2009 to 15 percent year-over-year at the end of May. Bank loans fell 25 percent in May from April. Excavator sales fell 10 percent in May from a year earlier, possibly foreshadowing a construction bust. The 14.3 percent decline in the Shanghai Composite Index last year and the 10 percent drop since mid-April also don’t bode well for growth.
Despite all these negatives, with recent data showing first-quarter GDP expanding by a still-healthy 9.7 percent, and consumer inflation at its highest levels since July 2008, China has continued to tighten its economic policy. The government raised banks’ reserve requirements to 21.5 percent in June, the ninth such increase since November. And it will probably continue to tighten until it sees decisive results — that is, a hard landing.
What will happen next?
…China’s most likely reaction — to focus still more on exports — will exacerbate its hard landing. If consumer spending doesn’t increase substantially in the next few years, China will have a serious problem using all the industrial capacity it has built, partly to keep people employed. Capacity is mushrooming so rapidly that even in China’s booming economy, most manufacturers are still seeing flat or falling utilization rates.
This unused capacity portends weak profits and trouble for the loans that financed it. My judgment is that it will once again be used for exports aimed at the U.S. and Europe. And once again, this will add to global excess supply and put downward pressure on prices.
Then China, along with other export-dependent emerging economies, will be competing fiercely in a world of slow growth and deflation…
The hard landing that I foresee for China will probably prick the global commodity bubble, which is already showing signs of topping out… Much of the leap in commodity prices was due to investors and other speculators…
The confidence that China would continue to buy huge quantities of almost all commodities has been the bedrock belief of speculators. For example, there were rumors that China was again building its emergency petroleum reserve in the first half of this year.
I’ve studied many bubbles over the years, and concentrated on predicting their demises. Commodities show every sign of being in one…
Speculators are starting to take stock of the evidence of a hard landing in China, and industrial commodity prices, including copper, are swooning. As in the past, warnings about shortages in key industrial inputs are magically being contradicted as unaccounted-for stockpiles materialize…
The bursting of the commodities bubble will be bad news for developing-country producers such as Brazil, which has thus far largely escaped recent global economic and financial woes but is a major exporter of iron ore and other commodities to China. Developed commodity exporters — Canada, New Zealand and Australia — as well as their currencies, may also suffer.
I’ve long believed that a hard landing in China would be preceded by a price collapse in copper and other industrial commodities. Copper prices peaked in February, and Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX)’s agreement on April 25 to acquire copper producer Equinox Minerals Ltd. to gain mineral resources outside its area of specialization is a classic sign of a peak.
Another classic sign of a speculative price peak was the sudden appearance of copper inventories where none were thought to exist. As prices start to break, hoarded commodities suddenly become available for sale by highly leveraged owners. Copper in China was so abundant that bonded warehouses were full. In January and February, extra copper was sold abroad as Chinese exports were eight times the year-earlier total…
…there is so much leverage money floating around the world that regardless of how it’s managed –by fundamental, momentum or technical strategies — it tends to end up on the same side of the same trades at the same time. So, when one of these positions reverses, the effects spread rapidly as speculators bail out of their positions to reduce risk and preserve their capital. Keep in mind that the prices of the wide variety of commodities continue to move in lockstep.
Many commodity bulls see this trend as a short-lived midcourse price correction and have maintained their long positions in copper, crude oil, corn and even silver. But markets anticipate, and it now appears the declines in commodities are foreshadowing a hard landing in China, with the effects spreading globally.
The extracts provided above are the sections that I believed are most pertinent and comprise only around one-third of the detail provided in the Bloomberg articles. Readers seeking more detail are encouraged to read the articles in full for themselves (available here: Part 1 ; Part 2 ; Part 3 ; Part 4 ; Part 5 ).
