Yesterday on their website, the People's Bank of China announced a shocker. New Chinese bank lending for June was 1.53 trillion yuan ($224 billion), double the lending in May. The total already for the year is an astounding 7.4 trillion yuan when the target for the entire year was 5 trillion. Putting this in context, total lending this year so far has amounted to 25% of 2008 GDP. As I wrote earlier this week, Chinese regulators are getting concerned that this lending is going towards poor credit and bleeding into commodity market speculation. As most know, bank lending is high powered monetary stimulus due to its high velocity. This is the key difference between fiscal stimulus vs. monetary stimulus. Actually, monetary stimulus will only work well if the banks receiving the funds lend them out. In the US, this is clearly not happening due to banks loan losses and caution over new lending (expanding balance sheet.) In China, this is not the case and new loans are flowing. - CNBC
Dominant Social Theme: China is heating up.
Free-Market Analysis: We've written about this before. China backed into "capitalism" about 30 years ago and the impetus for where it is now was increased by the problems with Tiananmen Square. The Chinese leaders are not interested in political theory at this point (if they ever were). Their currency is power and the way to maintain power is to create an apolitical system where citizens "can grow rich." Western systems work a good deal better than communist systems in this regard. And thus China has built a facade of a Western system.
Rest here.
http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=443&fl=
Dominant Social Theme: China is heating up.
Free-Market Analysis: We've written about this before. China backed into "capitalism" about 30 years ago and the impetus for where it is now was increased by the problems with Tiananmen Square. The Chinese leaders are not interested in political theory at this point (if they ever were). Their currency is power and the way to maintain power is to create an apolitical system where citizens "can grow rich." Western systems work a good deal better than communist systems in this regard. And thus China has built a facade of a Western system.
Rest here.
http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=443&fl=
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