China

Over the past week one of the more hotly debated and market moving topics was the resurgence of speculation that China may be on the verge of a "hard landing." To a large extent this was driven by renewed concerns that the country's debt load, especially at the local government level, will be a substantially greater hindrance to growth and hence, concern than previously thought. This was paralleled by concerns that Chinese growth will likely slow down substantially more than previously expected, even as inflation remains stubbornly high. The result: a move wider in Chinese CDS in the past week whose severity was matched only by a similar move around the time of Lehman, when the world was widely seen as ending. Concerns that delusions about decoupling are precisely that (courtesy of 3 out of 4 BRICs printing a contractionary sub-50 ISM also led to the biggest drop in the Hang Seng index since 2001, after it tumbled 22% in Q3 as fears that a Chinese slow down would impact all developing economies with an emphasis on East Asia. Yet if a Hard Landing is all it took to disturb the precarious balance in which China always somehow always ride off into the sunset having rescued the entire world, we wonder what would happen if the market started expressing concerns that a Hard Landing is the optimistic case, and nothing short of a Crash Landing may be the baseline. Because according to the Economist, which informs us of a very troubling development out of China in which foreigners may be about to face a new entitlement funding tax for all domestic workers beginning October 15, and hence a surge in overall labor costs, then a "Crash Landing" may well be in the cards for the world's biggest marginal economy.

This week's trifecta of key financial developments, that go far deeper than superficial headlines, namely China, Morgan Stanley (and European bank exposure in general) and the equity-credit disconnect, just got another major push. CNBC just interviewed Tim Backshall (of Capital Context) to discuss the dramatic moves in MS credit risk (which we mentioned earlier) and in an undeniably convincing accent (British, Aussie, South African?), he managed to bring many of our broader concerns into focus including global financial contagion, bank funding, Chinese growth, and high yield credit. We also learned that ZeroHedge is a blog.

The move in Morgan Stanley CDS has been grabbing some attention.  It has moved wider than any of the other banks.  Its exposure to French banks in particular has been part of the reason.  Potential hedging of counterparty exposure has also been listed as a reason. (Once again I can’t help but wonder why derivatives in general, and CDS in particular, didn’t get forced into clearing or exchanges after Lehman). I don’t know whether Morgan Stanley is rich or cheap at these levels, but I think there is more digging that needs to be done and it should focus on Asian exposures because that seems to correlate best to the recent moves.

Update: CDS now over 200 bps, or over 7 bps since this artice was posted.

This is an emergency announcement for bubble watchers: China CDS has soared to 194.5 bps, +14.5 in the past few hours (a trend first noted here about a week earlier), the biggest relative mover in the sovereign realm, which has just hit the widest it has been since March 2009. Ironically the incremental newsflow was mildly positive after the Final September HSBC PMI came at 49.9, still contractionary, but modestly better than the Preliminary 49.4, and unchanged from the August print. That however brought little solace to China bulls, who have seen their local stock holdings drop significantly in the last few days now that the China "Hard Landing" scenario is becoming widely accepted. Not helping is a just released UBS report which now expects Q1 2012 GDP to drop to below stall speed at 7.7%. Whether or not the country can land softly, or hardly, or at all, with that kind of growth drop, is certainly unknown. Look for more widening in CDS spreads as the China crash thesis permeates the vigilante community which has now picked its next target.

When one compiles the annals of the great deflationists of the early 21st century, they will be hard pressed to decide who is deserving of the title most ferocious deflationist in a runoff between David Rosenberg and Gary Schilling. And while David did not have much notable to say today, despite his daily release of interesting and insightful commentary from his perch atop Gluskin Sheff, Gary Schilling took advantage of the media vacuum to appear on Bloomberg TV and preach, what else, deflation. Among the topics touched upon were the #1 issue du jour - the Chinese hard landing, presented earlier here, and the resulting collapse in copper, on bond market volatility, on investing and speculation, and lastly on the S&P, which just like Rosenberg, he see as deserving of a 10x multiple applied to a soon to be revised S&P 500 EPS of 80 (do the math). All in all sensible stuff except for one thing: his statement "Inflating away is an excess supply world is almost impossible, even for the Fed" leaves a little to be desired. While he may be spot on, it does not mean the Fed will not try. And try it will: we expect rumblings for full blown LSAP to commence in a few days, and QE4 in which the Fed will pull a BOJ and buy ETFs, REITs (in addition to MBS and Agency bonds) early in 2012, after which it will be time to quietly depart from these continental US, or else load up on lead, spam and precious metals.

Earlier today Bank of America released a presentation and a conference call in which the firm's head of China equity strategy David Cui spoke about the dreaded "China Hard Landing" or the event that would kill all decoupling dreams for ever and ever, and probably lead to a world depression. It seems that the latest down move in the market is being partially attributed to just this notification finally making the rounds as can be seen in the note below: "BofAML’s David Cui is the Markets’ #1 rated China Strategist according to the 2011 Institutional Investor All-China Survey. While he is not responsible for our China GDP forecast, he sees significant Chinese specific financial market risks that could trigger lower than expected Chinese growth. He sees that those financial market risks as having increased considerably. He will expand on this on the call, but he sees these financial stresses as having a very high probability of triggering lower than expected growth. That lower growth could well be sub 7%, and therefore by Chinese market standards would be termed a “hard landing”, clearly a HUGE issue for all global markets." Granted this is not news to those who have been following the Chinese situation (as fringe blogs have been for over a year), but the market does tend to have a habit of being about 12-18 months behind the curve. Here is what Bank of America had to say...

EURUSD opened down 80pips, to below Friday's lows, but has somewhat rapidly recovered those losses shifting into the green now in very early (and thin) trading. We assume this means the market has still not processed the latest news from China, which officially refutes, for the third time, rumors of an imminent Chinese bailout. From Bloomberg: "It’s “too early” to determine how emerging economies can further help the euro area overcome its sovereign debt crisis because reforms are still under way, China’s Central Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said. “We need to first see if euro-zone countries can implement their July 21 decision,” Zhou told reporters at the International Monetary Fund in Washington on Sept. 24, referring to a pledge by European leaders to expand the powers of a regional rescue fund. He doesn’t expect Greece will default on its debt and anticipates Europe will be able to overcome its crisis through reform, he told reporters." So, first the bank recap rumor refuted, and now the China bailout one... Perfect: it means that the upcoming week will see brand "new" rumors talking about... bank recaps and a Chinese bailout of Europe.

Helpful non-confrontational, non-trade-war, conciliatory comments from China's finance minister Xie speaking at the IMF meetings.

*CHINA SAYS IMF SHOULD STUDY DEFECTS OF WORLD MONETARY SYSTEM

*CHINA SAYS IMF SHOULD DIVERSIFY GLOBAL RESERVE CURRENCIES

*CHINA SEEKS `STABLE VALUE' IN RESERVE CURRENCY SYSTEM

Remember all those daily rumors (prmarily courtesy of the FT) that either China, or Japan, or Europe itself would bailout Europe (yeah, don't ask). Well we can put them all to rest...for at least a few more hours. Because in the battle of inverse counter disinformation, it is important to refute the rumors you yourself have created just so next time the same rumor is spread it has some impact.... Unfortunately said impact will be less, much less, with every single iteration, until just like central bank intervention, its impact is lost in the noise. Per Businessweek: "Officials from China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-biggest economies, indicated that their support for Europe will have limits  and the region needs to solve its own debt crisis. Japanese Finance Jun Azumi said in Washington today that while his nation can buy European Financial Stability Facility bonds if needed, there is no blank check. “At the margin we can do quite a bit to help,” Chinese central bank Deputy Governor Yi Gang said in a panel discussion yesterday at the International Monetary Fund in the same city. At the same time, “the real solution of the European sovereign debt crisis has to be done by Europeans themselves." Good luck in that whole Europeans coming up with a solution: after all it was mere hours ago that France’s Baroin said that the Eurozone is "open to support from others." Translation: "Show us the money." In other news, the countdown for the latest European bailout rumors from the FT is now on.

China's HSBC Flash Manufacturing PMI was released earlier this evening and showed continued weakness at 49.4 (below 50 implying a majority of manufacturers saw conditions deteriorating). The continuing moderation of growth is weighing on the Shanghai Composite which is down around 2% but it is the CDS market that is really cracking. 5Y China CDS is now an additional 20bps wider than the 10bps decompression we saw during Wednesday and is back to March 2009 levels at 167bps. It seems global markets are disrupted.

UPDATE: A number of Asia-Pac Sovereigns are cracking wider this morning.

One of the recurring themes on Zero Hedge in the past several months has been the continued mockery of the seemingly global conventional idiocy that China can bail out the world, when it itself is on the verge of a huge credit bubble popping and requiring the rescue of China itself by the rest of the global pyramid scheme (which however will be far too busy monetizing its own debt by then). Why, we vividly recall this quote from July 4, "So let's get this straight: a country which has 10% of its GDP in the form of bad debt, is somehow expected to be credible enough to buy not only Greek debt, but the EURUSD each and every day? Mmmmk. In the meantime, Dagong downgrades the US to junk status in 5, 4, 3..." Well, Dagong did since downgrade the US (as did S&P), although not to junk just yet, and somehow the world still continues to labor under the illusion that China (whose shadow banking system we also covered most recently here), is somehow healthy because it is far better than Europe (and the US) in hiding the true severity of its problems. Naturally, as long as that persists, the global ponzi will always have the benefit of pulling out a "white knight" whenever needed, regardless of just how ludicrous such an presumption has become. Today, famous China bear Jim Chanos appeared on Bloomberg TV and recapped his thesis which summarizes the bulk of these points, further extrapolating based on the Andy Lees analysis posted yesterday which estimates what a true economic growth rate is when one factors for bad debt and loss severities. His conclusion: "If we assume that China will grow total credit this year between 30% to 40% of GDP, and half of that debt will go bad, that is 15% to 20%.  Say the recoveries on that are 50%. That means that China, on an after write off basis, may not be growing at all. It may be having to simply write off some of this stuff in the future so its 9% growth may be zero." And this stagnant, overlevered behemoth is somehow supposed to be... the world's white knight?

A flurry of headlines out of China suggest global macro-economic volatility may be ready to take it to the next level. We discussed last week how China's oh-so-generous offer of help to Europe was merely a veiled threat playing US against Europe in a game of who-gets-the-funding. Well, tonight, it seems, they are making good on some of those threats. Aggravated by EU's lack of market economy recognition, they pull trading lines with French banks, express concern at the EUR's safety (preferring US Treasuries) and indicate a clear preference for bonds over stocks - all the while warning of growing trade tensions - consider the sabre-rattled.

UPDATE: Xinhua News claims Fitch bearishness on China's banking industry is 'suspicious' and the US and Europe should ditch 'protectionist' measures; Ambassador Locke then opines on China's business climate and policies casting doubt in investor's minds.

It has been a while since we heard anything about everyone's favorite contrarian and most outspoken hedge fund manager, Hugh Hendry, and probably for a good reason. As everyone else was complaining about their performance (and P&L) collapsing, blaming it on everything from the weather, to Bernanke's diet, to fundmanetals and technicals, Hugh Hendry was raking it in and is now up 38.65% YTD, with a stunning +22.5% in August alone (or pretty much mirroring the collapse at Paulson & Co) and another 11% in September! As the FT reports, Hugh Hendry's Eclectica fund has "has soared in value over the past two months as global markets have plummeted and industry peers have suffered damaging losses." Hendry's opinion on China is no secret, with an indicative snippet being that he anticipates a 1920's Japan-like crash in China. And as was reported previously, based on his recent trade of buying up lost of Japan CDS of companies exposed to China, his outperformance is no suprise. Expect to hear much more about Hendry as the media gets tired of paraphrasing sob stories and actually focuses on the (very few) winners from the most recent market blow out, confirming that contrarian, non-lemming approaches to investing still do pay off.

The U.S. government simply made a bad 'speculative' investment decision on behalf of the American public, based on questionable due diligence process and circumstances, but China has nothing to do with that.

There are two mainstream market assumptions that, in my mind, prevail over all others. The continuing function of the Dow, the sustained flow of capital into and out of the banking sector, and the full force spending of the federal government are ALL entirely dependent on the lifespan of these dual illusions; one, that the U.S. Dollar is a legitimate safe haven investment and will remain so indefinitely, and two, that China, like many other developing nations, will continue to prop up the strength of the dollar indefinitely because it is “in their best interest”. In the dimly lit bowels of Wall Street such ideas are so entrenched and pervasive, to question their validity is almost sacrilegious. Only after the recent S&P downgrade of America’s AAA credit rating did the impossible become thinkable to some MSM analysts, though a considerable portion of the day-trading herd continue to roll onward, while the time bomb strapped to the ass end of their financial house is ticking away. China, being the second largest holder of U.S. debt next to the Fed, and the number one holder of dollars within their forex reserves, has always been the key to gauging the progression of the global economic collapse now in progress. If you want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, watch what China does today.