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Colin Bennett

China's growing mega cities - 0 views

www.scmp.com/...nas-growing-mega-cities-remain

trends copper urbanization China

shared by Colin Bennett on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • In much the same way, China's urbanisation will continue to unfold in the major centres where the jobs are. Today, only about 15 per cent of China's population lives in its top three urban regions: the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and greater Beijing
Colin Bennett

Abridged: China's Cooling Property Market May Curb Demand - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ty-market-may-curb-demand.html

trends copper China building

shared by Colin Bennett on 10 Aug 10 - Cached
  • “A slump in China’s property market is negative for metals demand,” Yang Jun, an analyst at Hongyuan Futures Co., said from Beijing today. “Those who buy houses far from the city center tend to buy cars as well, so it’s not just copper demand from the construction industry that will go down.” China’s property prices climbed at the slowest pace in six months in July, the statistics bureau’s newspaper, China Information News, reported today. Regulators have ordered banks to conduct more stress tests to gauge the effect of a property value drop of as much as 60 percent, raising concerns that prices have further to fall.
Wade Ren

The end of Bretton Woods 2? - 0 views

blogs.cfr.org/...the-end-of-bretton-woods-2

2008-crisis economics

shared by Wade Ren on 29 Oct 08 - Cached
  • The Bretton Woods 2 system – where China and then the oil-exporters provided (subsidized) financing to the US to sustain their exports – will come close to ending, at least temporarily. If the US and Europe are not importing much, the rest of the world won’t be exporting much.
  • And rather than ending with a whimper, Bretton Woods 2 may end with a bang. In some sense Bretton Woods 2 has been on life support for a while now. China’s recent export growth has depended far more on Europe than on the US. US demand for non-oil imports peaked in 2006. One irony of the past year is that the US was borrowing far more from China that it was buying from China. Campaign rhetoric that the US was paying for Saudi oil with funds borrowed from China isn’t far off – though it leaves out the fact that the US also borrows from Saudi Arabia to pay for Venezuelan, Mexican and Nigerian oil.
  • If Bretton Woods 2 ends in 2009 – if US demand for imports falls sharply in the last part of 2008 and early 2009, bringing the US trade deficit down – it won’t have ended in the way Nouriel and I outlined back in late 2004 and early 2005. We postulated that foreign demand for US debt would dry up – pushing up US Treasury rates and delivering a nasty shock to a housing-centric economy. As Brad DeLong notes, it didn’t quite play out that way. The US and European banking system collapsed before the balance of financial terror collapsed. Dr. DeLong writes: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The end result of this crisis though could be rather similar: a sharp contraction in credit, a fall in US economic activity, a fall in US imports and a fall in the amount of foreign financing the US needs.* The US government is (possibly) trying to offset the fall in private demand by borrowing more and spending more — but as of now there is realistic risk that the fall in private activity will trump the fiscal stimulus.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Or, to put it more succinctly, Bretton Woods 2, as it evolved, hinged both on the willingness of foreign central banks to take the currency risk associated with lending to the US at low rates in dollars despite the United States large current account deficit AND the willingness of private financial intermediaries to take the credit risk associated with lending at low rates to highly-indebted US households.
  • But now US financial institutions are neither willing nor able to take on the risk of lending even more to US households. For a while the US government was able to ramp up its lending to households (notably through the Agencies) and in the process effectively take over the function previously performed by the private financial system (over the last four quarters, the flow of funds data indicates that the Agencies provided around $800 billion of net credit to US households). But now the US government is struggling to keep the financial system from collapsing. It doesn’t seem like it will able to avoid a sharp fall in the overall availability of credit.
  • It is now clear how the financial sector kept profits up: it took on more risk, as it shifted from borrowing short to buy safe long-term assets (Treasuries and Agencies) to borrowing short to buy risky long-term assets. Leverage in the system also increased (and for some broker dealers that seems to be an understatement), as more and more financial institutions believed that the US had entered into an era of little macroeconomic or financial volatility. The net result seems to have been a truly explosive concentration of risk in the hands of a core set of financial intermediaries in the US and Europe. Securitization – it seems – actually didn’t disperse risk into the hands of institutions able to handle it.
  • I hope that the process of adjustment now underway isn’t as sharp as I fear. The US economy gradually can shift from producing MBS for sale to US investors flush with cash from the sale of safe securities to China and Saudi Arabia to producing goods and services for export – but it cannot shift from churning out complex debt securities to producing goods and services overnight. Indeed, in a slowing US and global economy, improvements in the US deficit will likely come from faster falls in US imports than in US exports – not from ongoing growth in US exports.
  • But right now it looks like there is a real risk that the adjustment won’t be gradual. And it certainly looks like the flow of Chinese (and Gulf) savings to US households over the past few years has produced one of the largest misallocations of global capital in recent history.
  • US taxpayers are going to be hit with a large tab for the credit risk taken on by undercapitalized financial intermediaries. Chinese taxpayers may get hit with a similar tab for the losses their central bank incurred by overpaying for US and European assets as part of its policy of holding its exchange rate down. The TARP is around 5% of US GDP. There are plausible estimates that China’s currency losses will prove to be of comparable magnitude. Charles Dumas puts the cost at above 5% of GDP: “Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research estimates that China makes 1-2 per cent on its (largely) dollar reserves. It then loses up to 10 per cent on the exchange rate and suffers a Chinese inflation rate of 6 per cent for a total real return in renminbi of about minus 15 per cent. That is a loss of $270bn a year, or a stunning 7-8 per cent of gross domestic product.”
  • Jboss — if some of the Chinese inflow could be redirected into investment in alternative energy, that would indeed be a win/ win. Some infrastructure bank style ideas have promise in my view — basically, the flow that used to go to freddie/ fannie could go to wind farms and the like. I would rather see more adjustment in china (i.e. more investment in Chinese infrastructure) but during the transition, if there is one, to a lower Chinese surplus, redirecting chinese financing toward new energy tech would be offer real benefits.
  • China likes 3rd generation nuclear power. Safe, lower cost than NG or coal, very much lower cost than coal with carbon sequestering, and zero carbon footprint. Wind is about 4X more expensive than our electric costs now. That’s in an area with consistent wind. Solar is worse. I don’t know if we can sucker them into investing in our technical fairy tales. Here’s a easy primer on 3rd gen nukes. http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCostOfNuclearPower
    • Wade Ren
      Wade Ren on 29 Oct 08
       
      is this true?
  • btw, solar thermal installations are so easy & affordable to retrofit onto existing structures, it’s amazing that there aren’t more of them here…until you realize that they work to decentralize energy. cedric — china is already doing it in china. they are way ahead of the curve over there. my partner brought back some photos of shanghai — rows of middle class homes each with a small solar panel on top. and that’s just the tip of the iceberg — an architect friend just came back from beijing and wants to move to china (he’s into designing self-powering structures and is incredibly frustrated by the bureaucracy and cost-prohibitive measures in the US).
  • I went to engineering school right after the Arab Oil Embargo, and alternative energy was a hot topic then. All the same stuff you hear of nowadays. They even offered entire courses on it , which I took. Then my first mini career was in the power plant biz, before Volker killed it with interest rates and the Saudies killed any interest in alt. energy with their big oil field discovery. For the last 5 years I’ve been researching what’s changed, and it is frighteningly little. Solar cells are still expensive and only have a 15% conversion efficiency. They developed the new cost reduced film technology, but that knocks down efficiency to 7%. Wind power works where there is wind constantly. Generators are mature technology and are already 90 some percent efficient. Geothermal, tidal, ect. work where they are available. Looks like coal gasification and synfuel is out because it makes too much CO2. Good news is 3rd gen nuclear is way better than 1st gen plants. Hybrid cars are good, and battery technology is finally getting barely good enough for all electric cars to be practical.
  • According to news report today, Japan’s trade surplus is less than 1 billion $ in September 08, a whopping 94% decrease compared to September 07. Does it imply that going forward Japan can not buy as much treasury as before?
Colin Bennett

China upgrades environmental administration to ministry_English_Xinhua - 0 views

news.xinhuanet.com/...content_7766369.htm

regulatory trends

shared by Colin Bennett on 13 Mar 08 - Cached
  •   BEIJING, March 11 (Xinhua) -- China is to elevate the status of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) to a ministry, among the major 27 ministries and commissions of the Cabinet, said Hua Jianmin, State Council secretary-general, on Tuesday.
Colin Bennett

BHPB fears effect of stimulus withdrawal - 0 views

www.ft.com/...ad-11df-aa09-00144feab49a.html

trends copper BHPB

shared by Colin Bennett on 11 Feb 10 - Cached
  • BHP Billiton, the Anglo-Australian mining group, yesterday reported better-than-expected half-year results but flagged concerns about its growth prospects as governments around the world looked to unwind stimulus measures.Marius Kloppers , chief executive, said many economies, notably the US, were still dependant on government stimulus.He said such measures had helped drive recovery but had not addressed structural issues such as weak labour markets and excess production capacity in developed economies."A further variable will be the impact of any measures to control loan growth in China ," he said.He added that in the short term Beijing was focused on containment of asset inflation."We remain cautious about the speed and strength of the global economic recovery across the developed world."But longer term prospects were "robust" on the back of growth in China and India, Mr Kloppers said.
Colin Bennett

Beijing aims for slower, greener growth - Next 5 year plan - 0 views

www.ft.com/...77-11e0-aebf-00144feab49a.html

trends Copper China sustainability

shared by Colin Bennett on 07 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • China, the world’s largest energy consumer, intends to generate 11.4 per cent of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2015, up from 8 per cent today, under the terms of the next five-year plan. That shift is equivalent to moving the whole of Italy off fossil fuels.
Colin Bennett

BHPB strategy - 0 views

www.mining.com/-china-iron-ore-strategy-12893

trends copper BHPB

shared by Colin Bennett on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Mackenzie told reporters in Beijing on Thursday he expects rising Chinese demand for materials with more consumer uses, such as copper, while greater food consumption could lead to more demand for the soil nutrient potash.
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