Monday, January 14, 2013

China's economic growth figures too good to believe

I've been saying for some time now that you have to take Chinese economic data with a huge grain of salt.  It seems that analysts at Goldman-Sachs now are saying the same thing:
But no longer is it just the blogosphere that is openly taking Chinese data to task - as Bloomberg reports, even the major banks: Goldman, UBS and ANZ - are now openly questioning the validity and credibility of the goalseek function resulting from C:\China\central_planning\economic_model.xls.
From Bloomberg:
China’s unexpected surge in exports last month renewed concern from analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS AG and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ) that statistics from the nation can be unreliable.

The 14.1 percent jump from a year earlier was the biggest positive surprise since March 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The increase didn’t match goods movements through ports and imports by trading partners according to UBS, while Goldman Sachs and Mizuho Securities Asia Ltd. cited a divergence from overseas orders in a manufacturing index.
At the same time that both Europe (the EU adventure) and the US (the Obama adventure) are trying to gather all reins of power to an unaccountable government, there is a massive collapse in governmental moral authority and the trust of the populations concerning their governments.  What's funny is that the Educated Class simply doesn't seem to see this.  That's some impressive display of intellectual horsepower, right there.

We're at the end of the period where politicians could with impunity over promise and under deliver.  Now we're in the era where increasingly desperate governments (hello, California) make increasingly transparent Ponzi-like moves (hello, Greece) to keep things from falling apart for another 3 months.  This simply accelerates the loss of trust in governmental institutions.  Our miserable political class will take us all the way to the scene of the crash.



So which economic figures from the EU and US governments can we trust?  To ask the question is to answer it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In an unrelated note, what the heck is going on in the comments at that last link you provided?