Back in May, the BEA officially jumped the shark [9] when, to delighted cheers from the San Francisco Fed and Steve Liesman, it announced that going forward, US GDP data would be double seasonally adjusted.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of China’s National Statistics Bureau someone was probably chuckling under their breath at how long it took US statisticians to realize that the beauty of being in government is that you can make the numbers say whatever you want them to say.
Indeed, for China (whose GDP growth is at best exaggerated due to an understated deflator [10] and at worst is completely made up) going full-shark-jumping-retard means doing something so completely ridiculous that it hides in plain sight.
Something like loaning yourself a trillion yuan to prop up the stock market and then counting that trillion yuan loan towards credit growth.
Well as we reported not once, but twice (here [11] and here [12]), that’s exactly what China did in July when it reported that new RMB loans for the month nearly doubled expectations, coming in at CNY1.48 trillion and somehow, even though it was one of the worst kept secrets in the financial universe, some people actually believed the numbers. Case in point:
@Coffeeisforclo1 [13] mini-boom may be too strong, but hard to square surging credit growth and money supply with imminent collapse
— A Evans-Pritchard (@AmbroseEP) August 20, 2015 [14]
Yes, "surging credit growth", only 60% of which is completely made up.
Here's a look a look at the breakdown for anyone who missed it earlier this month:
[15]
[16]
So what should be abundantly clear there is that loans to the real economy (i.e. loans China did not make to itself in the form of equity plunge protection funding) fell a staggering 55%. In case it isn't clear enough from the above how embarrassingly anomalous the "loans to non-banking financial institutions" figure is, allow us to break it down (again):
[17]
And because we somehow get the feeling that quite a few people might be missing the point on just how significant this was from a big picture point of view, here's a look at the data, with helpful arrows that demonstrate the effect of China's decision to include these loans:
[18]
Behold, the power of counting a trillion yuan in stock market manipulation money towards credit growth.