Lately it seems that the entire world has become a complete basket case of economic data and market manipulation. On one hand, as we reminded yesterday, the disconnect between US economic fundamentals and the market has hit levels that imply the S&P is rich by 200 points [6]. On the other, this morning the Chinese stock index, the Shanghai Composite, closed at a level of 1991: this was the first sub-2000 close since 2009 so early one can make it 2008.
Why is this happening? One simple reason: for all its talk, the PBOC has refused to intervene in the market by cutting wholesale rates, and while Overnight Reverse Repos are enough to fool the naive Americans that the Chinese economy is better (it isn't), the locals know better. The locals also know that without any major monetary injection from within, stocks just won't go up (confirming that in the New Normal one can throw away all fundamental data once and for all and focus simply on where easy money is coming from).
Yet the punchline in today's data is the report from the People's Daily, that in the first ten months of the year, a total of 11.2 million urban jobs have been created, or about 1.1 million per month on average (in context, the US has a problem with creating 150K jobs/month). Ignoring for a fact that this data is total manipulated garbage, is it now safe to say that no news has any impact whatsoever on the global monetary policy playing field once known as stock markets?
[7]