"The Time Is Now" For Markets To Price In China’s Next Slowdown, A Gloomy Morgan Stanley Warns
By Tyler Durden
Just over a week ago, we pointed out that China’s great credit growth stimulus from early 2016, when the PBOC injected $1 trillion in new credit in the first quarter of the year, had come to a screeching halt in April, confirmed by the lack of growth in China’s broadest credit aggregate, Total Social Financing, which had just dipped to a negative growth print year-over-year.
While there were various important implications from this substantial Chinese slowdown, we concluded that the biggest concern for China, and the world, is that “now that China’s credit impulse is gone, it means that the it is only a matter of time before the impetus behind Chinese, and global growth, evaporates as per the timeline presented in the following Goldman chart, which explained the surge in Q1 economic activity, and which now anticipates a steep slowdown in the second and subsequent quarters unless China manages to stoke its unsustainable credit growth once again.”
To be sure, the CNY64 trillion question is how long before the market prices in this imminent slowdown.
According to a just released very bearish note by Morgan Stanley’s chief cross-asset strategist Andrew Sheets, which picks up on the risk factors unleashed by China’s dramatic slowdown the recent pick-up in global growth is temporary, and flags “greater risks that the slowdown arrives even sooner than August.” But most importantly, when looking at when the market will price in the next Chinese slowdown, Sheets says that “our China economic activity indicator (MS-CHEX) is at 3% versus 10% last month, while property sales in top cities have slowed to 15%Y in the first two weeks of May compared to 55%Y in April. If we think China growth softens again over the summer, the question for markets is how far ahead of this prices react.”
His conclusion: “the risks are rising that the time is now.“
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Here is Morgan Stanley’s full note on “Timing China’s Mini-Cycle”
It’s remarkable that in this day and age, when we can encode whole genomes and land spacecraft on comets, we struggle to answer basic questions on how big economies are doing. Although I’m going to focus on China, my fellow Americans shouldn’t be smug: The US enjoys some of the best economic statistics in the world and yet the market seems legitimately confused over whether the US economy is ‘weak’, ‘fine’, or actually starting to see a cyclical pick-up.
But in a contest for size and economic question marks, China may hold the crown. The speed and scale of the country’s growth has been remarkable, making China an essential part of the global economic fabric. The country consumes 45% of the world’s copper, produces 50% of the world’s steel, and is responsible for roughly 12% of global trade. Yet this importance is coupled with a level of uncertainty. Most investors that we meet believe China is extremely important to their outlook, and yet express a low degree of confidence in their ability to predict where it …read more
Source: "The Time Is Now" For Markets To Price In China’s Next Slowdown, A Gloomy Morgan Stanley Warns
