The Week (January 6)
“For the Chinese stock markets, it was not a happy New Year.” The initial drops in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Composites were “an unwelcome reminder of two precipitous crashes that befell China’s stock market midway through 2015.” Things have leveled off and it’s true that “the performance of any country’s stock market has only a tangential relationship to the performance of its real economy.”Nevertheless, “the situation for China’s real economy isn’t exactly good.”
Tags: 2016, China, Real economy, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Stock markets
Financial Times (December 21)
“A surge of deals in the pharmaceuticals, energy and consumer sectors has pushed merger and acquisition activity to an all-time high, surpassing 2007’s peak — but dealmakers have admitted that bond market turmoil and geopolitical instability are their biggest worries for 2016.”
Tags: 2016, Bond market, Consumer sectors, Deals, Energy, Geopolitical instability, M&A, Pharmaceuticals, Turmoil
Financial Times (December 3)
“For the average Japanese investor and consumer, inflation expectations have not budged. Japan needs to jump-start a wage-price spiral of the sort feared from the 1970s…. Such a cycle should be started by increasing nominal wages by 5 to 10 per cent in 2016.”
Tags: 2016, Consumer, Expectations, Inflation, Investor, Japan, Price spiral, Wages
Financial Times (March 22)
“China is on track for a fourth consecutive decade of rapid growth and will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy in 2016.” The prediction comes from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which predicts China’s economy will reach 8.5% growth in 2013 and 8.9% in 2014.
