The Li Keqiang index is not well

Tuesday 5 May 2015

According to a State Department memo (released by WikiLeaks), Li Keqiang (then the Party Committee Secretary of Liaoning) told a US ambassador in 2007 that the GDP figures in Liaoning were unreliable and that he himself used three other indicators: the railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and loans disbursed by banks. Keqiang index thus combines these three preferred indicators.

Here they are courtesy of Macquarie. Power consumption:

And two more just for Australia:

There is no quick recovery coming.

About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.