While our eyes have been glued to the volatility in U.S. markets, Chinese stocks have staged their own correction. The Shanghai Composite is down 12.1% from its high on January 24 to the low on Thursday, February 8. With the Lunar New Year and the week-long Spring Festival Holiday almost upon us, it’s not surprising that this is a volatile week.
In my daily trawling through the market I come upon lots of tidbits of knowledge that I think are important to investors but that don’t justify a full post. I’ve decided to start compiling these notes here each day in a kind of running mini blog that I’m calling Notes You Need. I launched this new feature on JubakAM.com on December 1. It runs only on JAM and won’t appear anywhere else. For example, 10:20 a.m.: It looks like China’s monetary authorities are starting to relax about the yuan.
The U.S. dollar fell today after President-elect Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. currency was too high–in part because China holds down the price of the yuan. On the comments the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was down 1.1% as of noon New York time.
Thanks to the 6.5% drop in the yuan against the dollar in 2016 and the 6% decline in the yuan against a benchmark basket of currencies, China’s dollar denominated exports fell 6.1% in December.
China faces a depreciating currency, a bond market that has switched from rally to sell off, huge outflows of cash, and what looks like a resurgence of inflation. Fixing one of these problems alone would be a huge challenge to the People’s Bank. The combination leaves the central bank with a situation where fixing one problem may just make the others worse. Increasingly the People’s Bank looks like it is rushing from problem to problem, giving the crisis-of-day a whack and then rushing to figure out what’s likely to pop up next that will deserve a bash with the mallet.
The last time that the People’s Bank tried to pull off this balancing act was back in January 2016 when what looked like an extended trend of weaker fixings against the dollar contributed in a decline in emerging markets of 13.8% from December 28 to January 20.
