Chinese
Sunset
John Mauldin
I
mentioned that fact at lunch today with a close friend of mine (who will allow
me to tell the story but not to mention his name in connection with it), and he
shared an anecdote that he had run into on a trip to Seattle the day before. It
seems that one of his friends bought a rather large, roughly $8 million, new
home in a nice part of Seattle and was selling his old home for a mere $4
million. Thirty prospective buyers came through to look at the property, and
not one of them spoke English – they were all Chinese.
Think
about that for a moment in the context of money leaving China. At the Hong Kong
gathering, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst noted that if the top 3% of
wealth holders in China moved just 7% of their money out of the country, it
would add up to $1.5 trillion. Personally, I think Chinese investors are being
smart to diversify their assets and asset bases. That is something we take for
granted in the West.
(My
friend David Tice, founder and ex-manager of the Prudent Bear Fund, who has a
killer apartment in my building – indeed, his apartment was the inspiration for
my getting and building mine out – wonders how he can get prospective Chinese
buyers to come see his place! The weather is a lot better in Dallas than it is
in Seattle. I know from talking to friends in New York City that a lot of
Chinese are also buying there, along with Russians and others from that corner
of the world.)
All
of which brings us to today’s Outside
the Box. Earlier in the week I asked my friend Gary Shilling if he
could give me a summary of his 2016 forecast. He agreed to do so and sent it
on. Then this morning he sent out a special short report on China that offers
what I think is a valuable perspective that differs from what we’re seeing in
the headlines, and so I asked him if we could use that for the OTB instead.
Gary
calls his special report “Chinese Sunset.” Towards the end he draws parallels
to Japan (which I too have done in previous letters and speeches).
While I
think that China will be significantly bigger in five years than it is today,
its growth path is coming back to Planet Earth and will be a challenging one
for a whole variety of reasons, many of which Gary discusses. (At the end of
his report, you can find out how to subscribe to Gary’s letter and get his full
2016 forecast.)
And
of course Gary is part of the great lineup of speakers I’ll have at my
Strategic Investment Conference. As you know by now, we’ve moved the conference
to my home turf here Dallas this year, and the dates are May 24-27.
Our theme
this year is “Decade of Disruption: Investing in a Transformed World.” China
will obviously be a topic of discussion, but we’ll cover the entire gamut of
economic, financial, and geopolitical issues that will impact our performance
as investors this year.
You
can go to the SIC 2016 website to get all the particulars on this
year’s conference and register to save $500 off the walk-up rate.
I
know I mention from time to time how busy I am, which I guess is a function of
how many fabulous opportunities I keep finding, not to mention all the stuff
that I feel it’s important to read; but my life just keeps getting busier and
better. And though I seem to have more than ever to do, I’m getting more and
more excited about working on my new book, The
Age of Transformation. It has been a massive learning process
trying to keep up with the 120 researchers who have volunteered to help me. The
book has turned into a Major Project, but it’s one of the most fun things I’ve
ever tried to do. I don’t want to say that I’m running fast, but my shadow is
beginning to complain about having to keep up. So I think I’ll hit the send
button and get back to work! And you have a great week!
Your
needing more time in the day analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
Special Report: Chinese Sunset
By A. Gary Shilling
The current turmoil in the Chinese economy and
financial markets is shaking security markets globally as the yuan nosedived in
the first week of this year and Chinese equities lost $1.1 trillion. What a
contrast to the 13.3% compound annual growth from 1992 through 2007 (Chart 1) that propelled
China’s GDP from 9% of America’s total to 59% last year (Chart 2)! So China moved ahead
of Japan in 2009 to become the world’s second-largest economy as hundreds of
millions of Chinese rose from poverty.
Reveling in Success
The Chinese revel in that success. They view
themselves as the world’s superior society, and have chafed at being under
European thumbs in the 1800s and Japanese hegemony in the last century. For
years, the Chinese have lusted to be big players on the global stage, and have
her yuan currency recognized by the International Monetary Fund as a reserve
currency, right up there with the dollar, euro, yen and sterling. It finally
was late last year.
They also have enjoyed the widespread conviction
in the West that, with recent sluggish growth in North America and Europe,
China was inheriting the mantle of global economic leadership. Indeed, many
observers in and out of China believed that growth there would spill over to
the West and spur gains in North America and Europe.
Leadership
Direction
In fact, however, economic leadership has been the
reverse. Like virtually all developing economies, China’s has been driven by
exports that directly or indirectly are sold to North America and Europe. And
those imports by the West are fundamentally curtailed by sluggish overall
economic growth, the result of deleveraging, the working off of excess debt
built up in the exuberant 1980s and 1990s. Annual Chinese export growth dropped
from 20% to 30% in the 2000s to a 7% decline last November from a year earlier (Chart 3).
In the U.S., real GDP growth has averaged only
2.2% since the recovery commenced in mid-2009, about half the rebound rate
you’d expect after the deepest recession since the 1930s. Similarly, the
eurozone has limped along at a 0.7% rate with another recession in 2011-2013
following the 2007-2009 global Great Recession while Japan’s real GDP has
averaged 0.9% with three more declines of a least two consecutive quarters
since 2009.
Globalization
Also, globalization the transfer of manufacturing
and other production from the West to China and other emerging economies is
largely completed, curbing that source of emerging economy advance. U.S.
factory output as a share of GDP skidded from 17% in 1997 to 12% in 2009, but
then leveled off when just about all the production that could be moved
overseas was offshored (Chart 4).
The resulting weakness in the Chinese economy,
however, was masked until recently by massive housing, capital spending and
infrastructure investment.
But the residues are excess capacity, ghost cities
and total corporate and government debt that leaped from 160% in 2004 to 232%
in 2014. Also, China’s huge total economic size covered up its
still-underdeveloped status. Even with the explosive growth in the past several
decades, Chinese GDP per capita in 2014 was $7,590, or just 14% of America’s (Chart 5).
Chinese leaders want to shift to a domestic-led
economy driven by consumer spending and services, but whenever overall growth
flags, they resort to the same old, same old infrastructure spending. So the
result is even more excess capacity and more political and economic power for
the inefficient State-Owned Enterprises. And officials merge them rather than
allow them to fail. At the same time, private firms are starved for capital.
These actions not only reveal Beijing’s distrust
of free markets but also its reluctance to address the trade-off between heavy
industry pollution generation and economic growth. Meanwhile, consumer spending
in China is almost off the chart compared to G-7 and even BRIC economies. It’s
34% of GDP in China vs. 59% in India, 60% in Italy and 68% in the U.S. (Chart 6).
Financial Pygmy
China is a giant in global manufacturing, but an
amateurish pygmy on the worldwide financial stage. That was evident last summer
when the government clumsily intervened to arrest the one-third drop in Chinese
stocks after hyping equities as the way to recapitalize debt-laden SOEs (Chart 7).
Margin selling was prohibited, brokers and
state-owned enterprises ordered to buy stocks and trading halted as share
prices plummeted. More recently, institutions are only allowed to sell 1% of
their stock positions, and then after three weeks notice. As scared investors
traded yuan for dollars to ship overseas (Chart
8), Chinese foreign currency reserves fell $600 billion since last
August to $3.3 trillion at year’s end. The removal of those yuan also shrinks
the domestic money supply.
Then followed currency devaluation as China
attempts to spur exports to revive economic growth, which is probably running
only half the official 6.9% rate (Chart
1). Additional devaluation is likely but more subtly to avoid
further massive flight from the yuan (Chart
8). Export subsidies, internal devaluation through wage and price
cuts, and a shift from the dollar to a trade-weighted basket of currencies are
all active possibilities. Notice (Chart
9) that since 2005, that the yuan has risen 26% vs. the dollar, but
40% against the trade weighted basket of currencies. This leaves China at a 14%
currency disadvantage compared with her trading partners.
Chinese officials say they want to move toward
free markets but still insist on top-down control a very difficult combination
to manage. Following the market turmoil touched off by the 1.9% yuan
devaluation last August 11, the central bank the People’s Bank of China said it
would set the yuan's daily fix, around which it is allowed to fluctuate 2%, in
line with the previous day's closing level.
That would give markets more sway
over its value than the previous administered rates.
But with this new mechanism, official attempts to
weaken the yuan to spur exports and economic growth in early January resulted
in a stampede out of the currency. So the PBOC abandoned that step toward a
free market for the yuan and ordered the government-controlled large banks to
buy yuan to support the currency. The daily currency fix is back to being a
black box. This reality was driven home by the recent statement by a senior
Chinese economic official that China has plenty of ammunition to defeat attacks
on her currency.
"Attempts to sell short the yuan will not succeed,"
he said. "The expectations of markets can be changed." Translation:
We have ways!
Recently, China security regulators instituted a
circuit-breaker system to protect investors from massive sell-offs by
suspending trading after meaningful market losses. But reflecting disdain for
stocks inherent volatility, they set the collar too narrow, at only 7%.
So it backfired after the limit was hit twice in
the system’s first four days and was suspended on January 7, only 29 minutes
into the trading day. Skittish retail investors that dominate the Chinese
market dumped stocks in anticipation of an early market closing, and
precipitated their expectation.
That was the shortest trading day in the
Chinese stock market’s 25 years.
Not Dead
China won’t shrivel up and die, but will be a much
less important actor on the global stage, as she shifts her orientation from
commodity-munching exports, housing and infrastructure to consumer spending and
services. The same was true of Japan starting in the early 1990s. Before that, many
Americans though they’d soon be working for Japanese companies or run out of
business by then.
The Japanese were buying Iowa farmland, Pebble Beach and
Rockefeller Center with gay abandon. But at the end of the 1980s, Japan’s stock
market bubble collapsed (Chart
10) as did overblown house prices (Chart 11), and the economy fell into the
still-ongoing era of tiny 1.1% real GDP growth and deflation (Chart 12).
Similarly, Chinese stocks went off the cliff last
summer (Chart 7) and
residential housing activity has collapsed (Chart
13). And just as Japan’s delay in cleaning up the busted zombie
banks in the 1990s and 2000s contributed to business malaise, China’s delay in
restructuring the SOEs will likely have similar repercussions.
Furthermore, China has yet to address the
trade-off between pollution and economic growth that Japan did earlier. We
remember being in Tokyo in the 1980s when pollution was so thick that even on
cloudless days, you still couldn’t see the sun.
Another parallel that’s slowing economic growth,
in both China and Japan, is the declining work force. Population in Japan is
actually falling (Chart 14)
as the sub-replacement fertility rate combines with the longest G-7 life
expectancy (Chart 15).
When the effects of no legal immigration into Japan are included, the
proportion of the total population of working-age is headed for the lowest
level among major countries (Chart
16).
Old Before Rich
In China, the earlier one child per couple policy
is slashing the number of prime new labor force entrants, the
15-to-24-year-olds (Chart 17),
while the supply of rural labor to move to cities and man factories has run
out. Unlike Japan, however, China is getting old before it gets rich.
The earlier massive buying of foreign assets by
Japan was aimed in part at securing raw materials for her manufacturing
juggernaut and markets for its output. In retrospect, however, it was also due
to a dearth of growth-spurring investment opportunities at home. Ditto for
China, which is now buying foreign real estate and other assets in huge
quantities.
We keep extensive files of newspaper clippings and
other information to help in writing our own reports. In the 1980s, the Japan
files were measured in feet but our China files took only an inch or two.
Today, it’s the reverse. Still, as shock-and-awe over China recedes in future
years, along with China’s significance on the world stage, we expect our files
on China to shrink back to Japan’s size.
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