来源
Gavekal Research
发布时间
Aug 23, 2023
URL
https://research.gavekal.com/article/making-sense-of-the-china-meltdown-story/?continueFlag=a091eb6e9a08155b72d8921282592786
“Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j’attaque.”
(“My center is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.” Ferdinand Foch, French general defending Paris at the September 1914 Battle of the Marne)
It is impossible to turn to a newspaper, financial television station or podcast today without getting told all about the unfolding implosion of the Chinese economy. Years of over-building, white elephants and unproductive infrastructure spending are finally coming home to roost. Large property conglomerates like Evergrande and Country Garden are going bust. And with them, so are hopes for any Chinese economic rebound. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is either too incompetent, too ideologically blinkered, or simply too communist to do anything about this developing disaster.
Interestingly, however, financial markets are not confirming the doom and gloom running rampant across the financial media. Consider the following points.
Bank shares
At Gavekal, we look at bank shares as leading indicators of financial trouble. When we see bank shares break out to new lows, it is usually a signal that investors should head for the exit as quickly as possible. This was certainly the case in 2007-08 in the US. Between February 2007 and July 2008 (six weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers), banks shares lost -60% of their value.
The same pattern unfolded in Europe. Between January 2010 and August 2011, eurozone bank shares fell -45%, collapsing to new lows even before Club Med spreads started to blow out.
Now undeniably, Chinese bank shares have not been the place to be over the past few years. Nonetheless, Chinese bank shares are still up a significant amount over the last decade. And this year, they have not even taken out the low of 2022 made on October 31st following the Chinese Communist Party congress. To be sure, the chart below is hardly enticing, even if the slope of the 200-day moving average is positive. Still, Chinese bank shares do not seem to be heralding a near-term financial sector Armageddon.
Digging further, if we look at the performance of Chinese bank shares relative to US and EU bank shares over the past five years, the banks of the world’s three major economic zones have delivered roughly similar share price performance.
Zooming in on performance over the past year seems to indicate that if there is a problem with banks, it lies more in the US than in China, where bank shares are flat year-to-date. So, if you were to look only at the charts, you would conclude that the weak link in the system is not Chinese banks but US regional banks. In the past five years, US regional banks have registered two massive sell-offs—the kind of sell-offs that make shareholders uneasy.
放大过去一年的表现似乎表明，如果银行存在问题，那么问题更多地出现在美国而不是中国。中国银行股份今年以来保持平稳。因此，仅从图表上看，你会得出结论：系统中的薄弱环节并非中国银行，而是美国地区性银行。在过去五年里，美国地区性银行经历了两次大规模抛售——这种抛售让股东感到不安。
Chinese equity markets
Given the relentless media negativity, you might expect Chinese equity markets to be making new lows. For sure, Chinese equity markets have delivered disappointing returns. Nonetheless, every major Chinese index —the Shanghai composite, the Hang Seng, H-shares—remains above its October 31st CCP Congress low, typically by between 10% and 20%. No one at Gavekal claims to be a technical analyst; and we are also well aware that all the captains lying with their ships at the bottom of the ocean relied on charts. Nevertheless, while the chart below is unenticing, it does not scream that an economic cataclysm is imminent.
考虑到媒体的持续负面报道，你可能会预期中国股票市场将创下新低。确实，中国股票市场的回报令人失望。尽管如此，每个主要的中国指数——上证综指、恒生指数、H股指数——都仍然高于10月31日中共十九届五中全会时的最低点，通常在10%至20%之间。
Commodity markets
China is the number one or two importer of almost every major commodity you can think of. So, if the Chinese economy were experiencing a meltdown, you would expect commodity prices to be soft. Today, we are seeing the opposite. The CRB index has had a strong year so far in 2023, and is trading above its 200-day moving average. Moreover, the 200-day moving average now has a positive slope. Together, all this would seem to point towards an unfolding commodity bull market more than a Chinese meltdown.
大宗商品市场
中国是几乎所有主要大宗商品的头号或次号进口国。因此，如果中国经济出现崩溃，你会预期大宗商品价格会偏软。然而今天我们看到相反情况发生了。CRB指数今年迄今为止表现强劲，并且正在高于其200日移动平均线交易。此外，200日移动平均线现在呈正斜率。综合来看，这一切似乎更像是大宗商品牛市的展开，而不是中国经济崩溃的迹象。
Exchange rates
Jacques Rueff used to say that exchange rates are the “sewers in which unearned rights accumulate.” This is a fancy way of saying that exchange rates tend to be the first variable of adjustment for any economy that has accumulated imbalances. On this front, the renminbi has been weak in recent months, although, like Chinese equities, it has yet to take out October’s lows.
That is against the US dollar. Against the yen, the currency of China’s more direct competitor, Japan, the renminbi continues to grind higher and is not far off making new all-time highs. And interestingly, in recent weeks, the renminbi has been rebounding against the South Korean won.
This is somewhat counterintuitive. In recent weeks, oceans of ink have been spilled about how China is the center of a developing financial maelstrom. Typically, countries spiraling down the financial plughole do not see their currencies rise against those of their immediate neighbors and competitors.
那是针对美元的。相对于日本的货币，中国更直接的竞争对手，人民币继续上涨，并且离创下历史新高并不远。有趣的是，在最近几周里，人民币一直在反弹兑韩元。
这有点出乎意料。最近几周来，关于中国成为金融漩涡中心的报道铺天盖地。通常情况下，陷入金融困境的国家不会看到自己的货币升值超过其邻国和竞争对手。
Chinese consumers
While headlines in the West are all about China’s unfolding economic meltdown, recent headlines in China have been all about how tourist arrivals in Macau are returning to where they were in 2018, before Covid, before China’s tech crackdown and before the real estate derisking crackdown. Either that, or the headlines are about how strong car sales continue to be.
Meanwhile, China’s consumer-facing e-commerce sales continue to chug along nicely. This year, Alibaba delivered its strongest first quarter in history, with revenues 10 times what they were seven years ago.
In other words, a range of data points seems to indicate that Chinese consumption is holding up well. This might help to explain why the share prices of LVMH, Hermès, Ferrari and most other producers of luxury goods are up on the year. If China really was facing an economic crash, wouldn’t you expect the share prices of luxury good manufacturers to at least reflect some degree of concern?
尽管西方媒体的头条新闻都关注中国正在发生的经济危机，但最近中国媒体的头条新闻则是澳门游客数量正在恢复到2018年疫情爆发前、科技监管收紧前和房地产风险化解前的水平。除此之外，还有关于汽车销售持续强劲增长的报道。
与此同时，中国面向消费者的电子商务销售依然保持良好势头。今年，阿里巴巴创下了历史上最强劲的第一季度业绩，收入比七年前增长了10倍。
换句话说，一系列数据似乎表明中国消费仍然稳定增长。这或许可以解释为什么路易威登、爱马仕、法拉利等奢侈品制造商股价在今年上涨。如果中国真正面临经济崩溃，难道你不会预期奢侈品制造商股价至少反映出某种程度的担忧吗？
Government debt markets
Aside from China’s approaching economic meltdown, the other major story of the past few weeks has been the very real meltdown at the long end of the US treasury market—a meltdown which has captured a lot fewer headlines than the much-heralded Chinese financial implosion. Over the last 12 months long-dated US treasuries have delivered a negative total return of -17.05%. Over the same period, Chinese bank shares have delivered positive total returns in renminbi terms of 6.7%.
What kind of financial crisis sees the banks of the country in crisis outperform US treasuries by over 20%? It would be wholly unprecedented.
Staying on the US treasury market, it is also odd how Chinese government bonds have outperformed US treasuries so massively over the past few years. Having gone through a fair number of emerging market crises, I can say with my hand on my heart that I have never before seen the government bonds of an emerging market in crisis outperform US treasuries. Yet since the start of Covid, long-dated Chinese government bonds have outperformed long-dated US treasuries by 35.3%.
In fact, Chinese bonds have been a beacon of stability, with the five-year yield on Chinese government bonds spending most of the period since the 2008 global crisis hovering between 2.3% and 3.8%. Today, the five-year yield sits at the low end of this trading band. But for all the negativity out there, yields have yet to break out on the downside.
除了即将来临的中国经济危机外，在过去几周里另一个重要事件就是美国国债市场远期利率的真实崩溃，而这一事件在很多头条新闻中并没有得到太多关注，相比之下中国金融危机备受瞩目。过去12个月，美国长期国债总回报率为-17.05%。与此同时，同一时期内中国银行股以人民币计价的总回报率为6.7%。
什么样的金融危机会导致该国银行表现超过美国国债20%以上？这是前所未有的情况。
继续谈论美国国债市场，中国政府债券在过去几年里远远超越了美国国债。作为经历了不少新兴市场危机的人士，我可以坦言从未见过一个新兴市场遇到危机时其政府债券胜于美国国债的情况。然而自Covid爆发以来，中国长期政府债券已经跑赢了35.3% 的美元计价长期US treasuries.
事实上, 中国公共部门和企业部门都保持稳定, 五年期收益率在2008全球金融危机后大部分时间都在2.3％至3.8％之间波动 。如今, 五年期收益率处于这一交易区间的低端。尽管外界存在很多负面情绪，但收益率仍未突破下行趋势。
High yield markets
While the Chinese government debt market has been stable, the pain has certainly been dished out in the Chinese high yield market. Yields have shot up and liquidity in the Chinese corporate bond market has all but evaporated. Perhaps this is because historically many of the end buyers have been foreign hedge funds, and the Chinese government feels no obligation to make foreign hedge funds whole. Or perhaps it is because most of the issuers were property developers, a category of economic actor that the CCP profoundly dislikes.
Whatever the reasons, the Chinese high yield debt market is where most of the pain of today’s slowdown has been—and continues to be—felt. Interestingly, however, it seems that the pain in the market was worse last year than this year. Even though yields are still punishingly high, they do seem to be down from where they were a year ago.
尽管中国政府债券市场保持稳定，但中国高收益市场确实承受了痛苦。收益率飙升，中国公司债券市场的流动性几乎消失殆尽。或许这是因为历史上许多最终买家都是外国对冲基金，而中国政府并不觉得有义务弥补外国对冲基金的损失。或者这是因为大部分发行人都是房地产开发商，而中共深恶痛绝这类经济主体。
无论原因如何，中国高收益债券市场承受了今天经济放缓带来的大部分痛苦，并且仍在持续感受到压力。然而有趣的是，与去年相比，今年该市场上的疼痛似乎要小一些。尽管收益率仍然非常高昂，但它们似乎较去年有所下降。
Where does this leave us?
Putting it all together, it seems fair to say that as things stand:
- There is a sizable problem in the Chinese real estate sector, and companies are going bust.
- Amazingly, however, Chinese banks seem to be weathering the storm, at least for now.
- The Chinese consumer continues to consume, even if not with the same gusto as in the years before Covid.
- Chinese equities have been disappointing, but Chinese equity markets are not in the kind of full-blown meltdown one might expect given the apocalyptic tone of reporting in the financial media.
- Commodity markets do not seem all that bothered by the implosion in Chinese real estate.
- Government bond yields in China remain stable, and have not broken down to new lows.
- US treasuries continue to melt down, even as returns on Chinese government bonds remain steady.
- The Chinese high yield corporate debt market remains completely dislocated.
So given the apparent lack of contagion from China’s troubled real estate sector to the banking system and broader financial markets, what accounts for the sudden surge in negativity across the world’s financial media towards all things related to China?
总结起来，在目前情况下可以说：
- 中国房地产领域存在着一个相当大规模的问题，并且企业正在破产。
- 然而令人惊讶的是，中国银行似乎正在经受住风暴，至少目前如此。
- 中国消费者继续消费，尽管不像新冠疫情之前那样热衷。
- 中国股市表现令人失望，但与金融媒体报道中所预期的全面崩盘相比，并非如此。
- 商品市场似乎并不太关注中国房地产的崩溃。
- 中国政府债券收益率保持稳定，并未跌至新低点。
- 美国国债持续下跌，而中国政府债券回报率保持稳定。
- 中国高收益公司债券市场仍然完全错位。 因此，在从中国陷入困境的房地产领域到银行系统和更广泛金融市场没有出现明显传染的情况下，导致世界金融媒体对与中国有关事物突然出现负面情绪的原因是什么？
Several possible answers spring to mind:
- For once, the press is running ahead of the markets. The first axiom everyone learns when starting off in finance is that “if it’s in the press, it’s in the price.” Most of the time, this is true, especially in today’s world of high frequency algo trading. However, every now and then markets are hit by “game-changing” events—such as the Lehman and AIG bankruptcies, the Enron accounting scandal, or the Madoff fraud—which can trigger a whole new wave of forced selling by leveraged investors, or simply of panic selling. This brings us to the true catalyst for most massive bear markets—what Charles likes to call the Ursus magnus of bear markets. An Ursus magnus is caused not by changes in productivity, or a slowdown in the growth of the economy, which are part and parcel of the normal economic cycle. Instead, an Ursus magnus is caused by a sudden gap between the volatility of asset values and the risk tolerance of savers. When such a gap occurs, either the government or the central bank must step in to bridge the gap when it threatens to become too wide, or risk a financial system collapse. Today, the obvious fear among many in the financial media is that such a gap is developing—or about to develop—in China, and that the Chinese government is doing nothing to plug it. So, the first possible explanation is that the financial journalists have correctly foreseen the crisis that is about to engulf China, even as Chinese policymakers and participants in China’s financial markets, commodity markets and OECD government bond markets remain inexplicably complacent about the financial tsunami that is about to swamp the global economy.
- The press needs a new scare story. Pandemic horror stories no longer sell. Neither do stories of harrowing human suffering in Ukraine or headlines about an impending world war. It’s not that the suffering has ended, or the risk has disappeared. It’s just that people have moved on. Similarly, people are tired of reading about climate change, and even more bored of gender-related culture-war posturing. What’s left? Perhaps impending economic doom might sell newspapers?
- People have the China-US treasury meltdown relationship all wrong. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Covid hysteria, the push for vaccination, the “Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian plant” story have all shown that critical thinking within the Western media is in short supply these days, and that most journalists would now rather be wrong with the consensus than be right alone. As a result, when a narrative starts to develop, Western media latch on to it, and lay it on thick.
几个可能的答案浮现在脑海中：
- 这一次，媒体领先于市场。 在金融界刚开始涉足时，每个人都会学到一个公理：“如果新闻报道了某事，那么价格已经反映了这一点。” 大多数情况下，这是正确的，尤其是在今天高频算法交易盛行的世界里。然而，偶尔市场会受到“改变游戏规则”的事件影响——比如雷曼兄弟和美国国际集团破产、安然会计丑闻或者麦道夫欺诈案——这些事件可能引发杠杆投资者大规模抛售或者恐慌性抛售。 这就带来了大多数巨大熊市的真正催化剂——查尔斯喜欢称之为熊市中的“Ursus magnus”。 Ursus magnus 不是由生产力变化或经济增长放缓引起的，后者属于正常经济周期的一部分。相反，“Ursus magnus” 是由资产价值波动率与储户风险承受能力之间突然出现差距所致。当出现这样的差距时，政府或央行必须介入，以防止差距过大而导致金融系统崩溃。如今，金融媒体中许多人担心的显然是这样一个差距正在中国出现或即将出现，并且中国政府对此毫无作为。因此，第一种可能的解释是，财经记者们正确地预见到了即将席卷全球经济的危机，尽管中国决策者和参与中国金融市场、商品市场和OECD政府债券市场的人士对此保持着难以理解的满不在乎态度。
- 媒体需要一个新的恐慌故事。 大流行病恐怖故事已经不再畅销。乌克兰遭受惨重苦难或即将爆发世界大战等头条新闻也不再吸引眼球。并非因为苦难结束或风险消失，只是人们已经转移注意力了。同样地，人们厌倦了关于气候变化的报道，甚至更加厌烦与性别相关的文化战争姿态摆拍。还剩下什么呢？也许即将来临的经济末日可以售卖报纸？
- 人们对中美国债券崩盘的关系完全误解了。 伊拉克大规模杀伤性武器、新冠疫情恐慌、推动接种疫苗的行动，以及“亨特·拜登的笔记本是俄罗斯策划”的故事都表明，西方媒体内部批判思维如今供应不足，大多数记者现在宁愿与共识保持一致而不愿意孤立地正确。因此，当一个叙述开始形成时，西方媒体会抓住它，并且加重其呈现。
This brings me to what should be the big story of the summer: the meltdown in US treasuries. Here is the biggest market in the world, the bedrock of the global financial system, falling by close to double digits in a month. And perhaps most amazing, this meltdown is occurring on limited news. There have been no Federal Reserve policy changes, no hawkish speeches from Jerome Powell. Basically, long-dated US treasuries just fell -9% on no news.
This should be the news. Instead, the news is all about China’s financial meltdown.
My initial reaction to this odd combination of terrible Chinese news with rising US treasury yields was to think: “This is odd. Why are US treasury yields rising when the Chinese news is so bad?”
Then it struck me that perhaps I had things the wrong way round and that I ought to be asking: “Is the Chinese news so bad precisely because US treasuries are melting down?”
这让我想到了夏季的重大事件：美国国债的崩盘。**这是世界上最大的市场，全球金融体系的基石，在一个月内下跌近两位数。**而且最令人惊讶的是，这种崩盘发生在消息有限的情况下。没有联邦储备政策变化，也没有杰罗姆·鲍威尔（Jerome Powell）发表鹰派演讲。基本上，长期美国国债在无任何消息刺激下暴跌了9%。
这应该成为头条新闻。然而，新闻却都关于中国金融危机。
对于可怕的中国新闻与不断攀升的美国国债收益率之间奇怪组合，我的初步反应是：“很奇怪啊！为什么当中国新闻如此糟糕时美国国债收益率还在上涨呢？”
然后我意识到也许我把事情看错了，并且我应该问自己：“难道正因为美国国债正在崩溃，所以才会导致中国新闻如此糟糕吗？”
Why am I hearing this now?
I grew up in a country—France—where about 70% of media advertisements were bought either by the government or by giant state-owned enterprises such as Air France, SNCF, and EdF. Moreover, this was a country where much of the media was owned either by weapons manufacturers such as Lagardère or Dassault, or by public works companies like Bouygues—groups that depended directly on the government’s franc for most of their revenues.
Then, having grown up—physically, if not mentally—in France, I moved to the fringes of a country that makes no bones about the importance of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Propaganda Department—a department important enough to occupy one of the most central locations imaginable in Beijing, right next to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. As a result, whenever I read a piece of news, my first inclination is always to wonder: “Why am I reading this now?”.
Why the sudden drumbeat about collapsing Chinese real estate and impending financial crisis when the Chinese real estate problem has been a slow-moving car crash over the past five years, and when, as the charts above show, markets don’t seem to indicate a crisis point?
At least, markets outside the US treasury market don’t seem to indicate a crisis point. So could the developing meltdown in US treasuries help to explain the urgency of the “China in crisis” narrative?
As the first chart below makes clear, an important divergence is now growing between the Chinese and US government debt markets.
中国房地产崩溃和即将来临的金融危机突然成为热点话题，但实际上过去五年中国房地产问题一直都是缓慢演变中的车祸，并且正如上面图表所示，并没有市场显示出危机的迹象。
至少，在美国国债市场之外，并没有显示出危机迹象。那么，美国国债市场的崩溃是否可以解释“中国危机”叙事的紧迫性呢？
正如下面第一个图表清楚地显示的那样，中国和美国政府债券市场之间正在发生重要分歧。
Basically, US treasuries have delivered no positive absolute returns to any investor who bought bonds after 2015. Meanwhile, investors who bought Chinese government bonds in recent years are in the money, unless they bought at the height of the Covid panic in late 2021 and early 2022. This probably makes sense given the extraordinary divergence between US inflation and Chinese inflation.
None of this would matter if China was not in the process of trying to dedollarize the global trade in commodities and was not playing its diplomatic cards, for example at this week’s BRICS summit, in an attempt to undercut the US dollar (see Clash Of Empires). But with China actively trying to build a bigger role for the renminbi in global payments, is it really surprising to see the Western media, which long ago gave up any semblance of independence, highlighting China’s warts? Probably not. But the fact that the US treasury market now seems to be entering a full-on meltdown adds even more urgency to the need to highlight China’s weaknesses.
随着中国积极努力在全球支付中扩大人民币的作用，西方媒体突出中国的缺点并不令人意外，因为它们早就放弃了任何独立性。然而，现在美国国债市场似乎正在进入全面崩溃阶段，这更加迫切需要突出中国的弱点。
A Chinese meltdown, reminiscent of the 1997 Asian crisis, would be just what the doctor ordered for an ailing US treasury market: a global deflationary shock that would unleash a new surge of demand and a “safety bid” for US treasuries. For now, this is not materializing, hence the continued sell-off in US treasuries. But then, the Chinese meltdown isn’t materializing either.
一场类似于1997年亚洲危机的中国崩盘，正是美国财政市场所需要的良药：全球通缩冲击将释放新一轮需求，并引发对美国国债的“安全投资”热潮。目前，这种情况尚未出现，因此美国国债持续遭受抛售。但与此同时，中国的崩盘也没有出现。
Investment conclusions
All this leaves investors at an important crossroads. On one hand, you can look at China’s recent travails and conclude—along with most Western financial journalists—that the world’s second largest economy is about to implode. From there, the investment conclusions follow pretty swiftly: sell all things related to China, sell commodities, other emerging markets, global financials and global value stocks. In a world in which China implodes, salvation will likely only be found in long-dated US treasuries and US growth stocks—which by sheer coincidence happen to be the very assets that the US and most global investors need to do well.
On the other hand, you can look at recent market behavior and conclude that as Chinese banks have spent the last year outperforming US treasuries, the immediate problem is not in the Chinese financial system, but in the US treasury market itself. If so, we are entering a new world in which US treasuries can no longer be thought of as the bedrock on which to build portfolios.
你可以观察最近市场行为并得出结论：由于过去一年里中国银行表现优于美国国债，问题并不在中国金融体系中，而是在美国国债市场本身。如果是这样的话，我们正在进入一个新世界，在这个世界里，无法再将美国国债视为构建投资组合的基石。
This was the thesis that underpinned my 2021 book Avoiding The Punch. So it is small surprise that I favor the second explanation. Investors should make up their own minds. In an attempt to help, I have summarized the arguments presented in this paper in the following decision tree. Its title should probably be: “Who are you going to trust? The financial media or your lying eyes?”