W(h)ither China? "The End Of Extrapolation"

Beijing, Nov.23, stock picks .- On November 5, just as the 18th Chinese Congress was about to elect a leadership that would merely perpetuate the status quo, in "The Chinese Credit Bubble - Full Frontal" we presented a little known fact: namely that while China's sovereign debt is whatever the country wishes it to be (which due to the SOE basis of its banks is really a hybrid of sovereign and financial debt), one bubble that the country can not hide is that of its corporate debt level, which has hit the highest relative to GDP level in the entire world.

Ten days later Businessweek followed up with "Corporate China's Black Hole of Debt", which contained the following replica chart:

And so the cat of China's real debt bubble is out of the bag and out for general consumption. Yet as promptly as it appeared, it was forgotten, as a desperate for any favorable economic news punditry has ignored the fact that economic data coming out of China is merely for propaganda purposes and consumption by the gullible (not our words, they belong to China's current Vice Premier and the man who will soon take the post of Premier, Li Keqiang, who 5 years ago said that "China's GDP figures are "man-made" and therefore unreliable...[most] figures, especially GDP statistics, are 'for reference only,' he said smiling."), and has latched on to the prior month of modestly more favorable, "rebounding" economic statistics.

As UBS George Magnus says, "Many people think the downswing has now ended, pointing to slightly feistier data in September and October for industrial production, fixed asset investment, retail sales, and exports, continued high levels of total social financing, and a renewed rise in corporate leverage." The trivial rebound will soon end but a far bigger problem will then reemerge: "the short-term outlook for growth pales into significance against the view that China will continue to grow at 7-8.5% for the foreseeable future."

And herein lies the rub: because while China is currently experiencing a brief dead cat bounce, a far greater question remains open: can China reverse its declining GDP growth rate and continue growing at what most realists now perceive as an unsustainable pace. Says Magnus in attempting to provide an answer: "This [...] rests on three critical but questionable propositions:
political will and capacity, the insensitivity of consumption to the
investment outlook, and the nature of rebalancing, itself."

Magnus then proceeds to share his vision of whether China can "rise above" the reality of an economy forced to transition from investment driven to one of consumption: a vision which is the topic of his latest paper titled "China: the end of extrapolation."

In short, his answer (which at 11 single-spaced pages is hardly short) is that the party in China has ended. Of course, he is far more diplomatic:

After a decade or more of turbo-charged growth, the economic model that drove it has led to deep imbalances, especially as regards the investment and consumption shares of GDP, significant increases in both the investment- and credit-intensity of GDP growth, and the distribution of income between profits and wages. A host of institutional, monetary, financial, tax and other fiscal arrangements has been developed to support this economic model. As we will explain below, changing this model has become of paramount importance if China is to avoid a disruptive bust in investment in the next 1-2 years, and lapse into a middle income trap in the medium-term. A change is all the more important as China’s competitive advantages in the global economy are slowly being chipped away by rising wage and labour cost pressures at home, and the development of cheap energy and new lower-cost, advanced manufacturing technologies in the US, South Korea and other OECD countries. ... Continue to read.