Chinese economic data is always good for a laugh. So, courtesy of some observations by Diapason's Sean Corrigan, let's laugh.
From February 8 "Material Evidence"
It seems that nothing will stop the idiot savants – as well as the consciously misleading - from plugging whatever numbers the state propaganda machine churns out straight into their ‘models’ in order to lend some spurious gloss of calculation to such pronouncements, no matter how unreliable, contradictory, or plain incredible these may be.
Take the Chinese GDP number for the broadest of these: Officially, last year’s nominal total came to CNY51.9 trillion, an increase of 9.8% or CNY4.6 trillion on 2011’s count. Yet, by adding up the individual data produced separately by the nation’s constituent 31 provinces and autonomous regions, we can calculate that the annual sum reached CNY57.7 trillion (11% higher), and that growth accelerated to 11.1% yoy, representing an increment of CNY5.8 trillion which was a quarter larger than that given by the official tally. Spreadsheets, anyone?
By now it has become almost trite to compare the electricity stats with those for GDP or industrial production, yet we have a rather worrying disconnect in other areas of energy use, too. Industry up by a double-digit amount alongside a gain in refined oil product use of no more than half of that (5.2% yoy), of which diesel consumption barely ahead at 1.5%? Makes perfect sense to me!
Then we have the miraculous rebound in ‘profits’ posted in December (and we will risk a roll of the eyes by asking, once again, how can businesses even begin to compute earnings on a monthly basis?). Setting the seal on QIV’s auspicious rebound and so helping the Shanghai Composite to a further 8% gain, December’s winnings were supposedly a cool 68% greater than the average of the previous three months; revenues were no less than 13% higher and, hence, margins were reported to have jumped by half from 6.5% to 9.7%. Oh, for such levels of operational gearing in an expanding market!
In other words, essentially every piece of economic data coming out of China is fabricated garbage. But since it is procyclical fabricated garbage it is good enough for algorithm ramp work.