Chinese Economics Thread

before I go buy myself a snack,
China offers to make US farm purchases as officials prepare for trade talks
  • Offer could be contingent on US easing export restrictions on Huawei and delaying October 1 tariff increase
  • Depending on how negotiations proceed, Trump is also considering delaying another round of tariffs set for December
Updated: 11:05am, 7 Sep, 2019
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China made a peace proposal in a phone call this week with top US trade officials with an offer to buy a modest amount of US agricultural goods, according to two people briefed on the call.

That offer, however, could be contingent on the United States easing export restrictions on Chinese tech giant Huawei and delaying an October 1 tariff escalation on roughly US$250 billion in goods, the people said.

Depending on how negotiations proceed, US President Donald Trump is also considering delaying another round of tariffs that will be imposed on December 15 on almost all remaining imports from China, including laptops, smartphones and other consumer goods, the people said.

Political donors and executives from major companies such as Wal-Mart made a push two weeks ago hoping to persuade Trump to back off the December round of tariffs, which would severely hurt consumers, one of the people said.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow indicated Friday the trade talks are “going to heat up” when Chinese officials come to Washington in the coming weeks. In announcing the meeting, the two governments also said they are hoping for “meaningful progress”.

Deputy-level officials from the US and China are expected to hold discussions in mid-September to prepare for a meeting of top officials in early October.

“I don’t want to predict anything. I’m just saying it is a good thing that they’re coming here, and tempers are calmer now,” Kudlow said on CNBC on Friday. “We’re engaged in very important discussions across the board, whether it’s agriculture or IP or tech transfer or cloud or cyber-hacking or trade barriers.”

Kudlow said the call on Wednesday involving Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin “went very well”.

The US Trade Representative’s office did not reply to a request for comment.

Talks with China collapsed in early May after Beijing backtracked on commitments it made in a 150-page draft agreement to enshrine certain obligations in its domestic law.

The US wants China to address policies that it says force American companies to hand over valuable technology or intellectual property to do business in the country.

“We would love to go back to where we were in May – where we were getting kind of close to an agreement, maybe 90 per cent of the way. But I don’t want to predict,” Kudlow said.

Trump has also demanded that China significantly increase purchases of US farm commodities such as soybeans and corn. China is one of the biggest markets for US agriculture exports, and farmers have been hit hard by China’s retaliation to US tariffs.

But Beijing has informally tied any agricultural purchases to the US treatment of Huawei. The telecommunications company was blacklisted by the Trump administration in May, effectively cutting it off from US semiconductor suppliers.

The Commerce Department has reviewed dozens of applications from US chip makers requesting a waiver to ship to Huawei, but none of those have yet been approved.

The two sides are still far from a larger deal. So far, Beijing has been unwilling to make any major concessions to address issues that the US says result in widespread theft of American technology.

Still, a partial deal could calm financial markets that have been whipsawed by almost every development in the nearly two-year-old trade fight.

The US Chamber of Commerce released an analysis on Friday that showed 43 per cent of executives at Fortune 500 companies have raised or addressed concerns over the duties. The report comes amid growing signs that the escalating tariffs are slowing US economic growth and may even be directing the country toward a recession.

“At this moment of uncertainty, it is critical that our leaders take decisive steps to bolster the economy and avoid actions that could turn talk of recession into reality,” Chamber CEO Tom Donohue wrote in a recent op-ed. “For the Trump administration’s part, the escalation of trade tensions with China must come to an end.”
 

supercat

Major
Russia will sell yuan bonds for the first time:

China and Russia to edge closer to reducing US dollar reliance with Moscow set to launch first yuan bond
  • Led by several banks including Gazprombank and China International Capital Corporation, the yuan-denominated bond could be launched this year
  • Moscow is hoping to increase interest by Chinese investors’ in Russian assets, while it will give Chinese investors another investment opportunity
Moves by China and Russia to reduce reliance on the US dollar are set to continue at the end this year or early next year with the Ministry of Finance in Moscow likely to launch its first yuan-denominated bond.

Moscow is hoping a yuan bond will lift interest by Chinese investors in Russian assets and it would also help to create benchmarks for the setting up of hedging options for roubles and yuan, sidestepping the
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“Currently, several banks led by Gazprombank and [China International Capital Corporation] are making efforts to realise this first yuan bond, [but] there are still some technical details we are working on,” said Cheng Daming, executive director at the China International Capital Corporation, one of China’s leading investment banks. “With some push, and joint efforts, we do believe we will realise this deal within the year or the beginning of next year.”

The Russian yuan-denominated bond will give Chinese investors another investment opportunity after China’s central bank updated rules on the Renminbi Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors scheme last year. This allows Chinese investors to buy yuan-denominated products in overseas markets, as long as yuan investments are not converted into foreign currencies.

“Because Chinese bond investors are not familiar with credit risk of Russia sovereign debt and the Moscow Stock Exchange, they need more time to get familiar with the whole deal structure, that might currently be the most important thing for this deal to take place,” Cheng added.

The bond would be the first-ever Russian sovereign debt issue in yuan, and it is expected to be listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange. Russian sovereign debt is rated as investment grade by all three international rating agencies, Fitch, S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s, meaning it presents a relatively low risk of default.

The idea was first proposed in 2016, although there have been several delays in putting the deal together. It was revived last year with China and Russia seeking to further strengthen ties amid escalating tensions with the United States.

The two nations have been keen to cut their dependence on the US dollar for some time as Washington uses access to the global US dollar payments system as a weapon to punish nations and individuals for breaking its laws, even outside the US.

To cut reliance on the US dollar, Moscow and Beijing have also talked about establishing a new system for direct yuan-rouble payment settlements, although the project has also suffered multiple delays.

Because Chinese bond investors are not familiar with credit risk of Russia sovereign debt and the Moscow Stock Exchange, they need more time to get familiar with the whole deal structure, that might currently be the most important thing for this deal to take place.

In bilateral trade, around 14 per cent of payments are already conducted in yuan and about 7 to 8 per cent in roubles, according to Russia’s Ministry of Finance. China is Russia’s largest trading partner, while Russia is China’s largest supplier of crude oil.

The Russian central bank has also been gradually substituting its US dollar-denominated assets for yuan assets in its foreign exchange reserves portfolio, purchasing US$44 billion worth of the Chinese currency in the second quarter of 2018, while selling more than US$100 billion. Russia held US$67 billion in yuan as of mid-2018, 15 per cent of its international reserves.

Since the first western sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2014, Moscow has stepped up building its own financial infrastructure to protect from further curbs on the activity of its banks and companies. Moscow has already raised capital this year selling Eurobonds denominated in euros and the US dollar.

Russian bank and exchange representatives, however, have expressed frustration over the lack of progress on deepening financial market connections with China despite supportive rhetoric from the two governments.

Denis Shulakov, first vice-president at the state-owned Gazprombank, said the yuan bond deal is important because it helps to establish a benchmark for creating more hedging options for those investing or trading in the Chinese currency.

Overall, foreign investors now hold slightly more than 2 trillion roubles (US$30.2 billion) of debt issued by the Russian Ministry of Finance, he added.

“No Chinese investors are buying Russia’s Ministry of Finance debt in roubles, that’s why the idea is to buy that debt in [yuan],” he said.

“Financial instruments are all dealt on the basis of trust. While foreign investors from the West seem to trust the Russian market, Chinese investors, by not participating in it at all, are seen as unaware or hesitant. This is not a technical, rather regulatory issue, it is an issue of trust of each other’s financial systems.”

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AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
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Trump thinks if China has to act to counter his tariffs, China is losing the trade war. You mean like how Trump wants the Fed to lower interest rates or play with the dollar or slap tariffs or bail out farmers to counter China?
 

Quickie

Colonel
thanks but the original statement by A-Mace is "Remember when one of his demands after China slapped tariffs was for China to target blue states only."
#10404 AssassinsMace, Yesterday at 7:24 AM

Why so much demand? I don't see the point of people making up stories on such matter, especially since it's quite trivial among the more outrageous demands from the U.S. side in the trade talks.

I heard (I didn't read) the gist of those wordings from a business news commentator commenting about the state of the trade talks.
 
Why so much demand? I don't see the point of people making up stories on such matter, especially since it's quite trivial among the more outrageous demands from the U.S. side in the trade talks.

I heard (I didn't read) the gist of those wordings from a business news commentator commenting about the state of the trade talks.
so is the sentence inside
#10404 AssassinsMace, Friday at 7:24 AM
:
"Remember when one of his demands after China slapped tariffs was for China to target blue states only."
true or false?
 
before I move to US-military news-servers
China’s exports fall unexpectedly in August, as trade war continues to slam industrial economy
  • Shipments down 1 per cent in month despite analysts forecasting further growth after 3.3 per cent rise in July
  • Imports remain cause of concern for Beijing, falling 5.6 per cent in August, meaning they have only grown in one month in 2019
Updated: 12:51pm, 8 Sep, 2019
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China’s exports fell unexpectedly in August, as the trade war with the United States continued to hit the world’s second largest economy.

Exports fell by 1 per cent last month after growing 3.3 per cent in July. The August result was below the 2.1 per cent growth expected in poll of analysts conducted by Bloomberg.

July’s expansion now seems like an anomaly, likely driven by front-loading as new tariffs of 15 per cent on about US$110 billion of Chinese goods that took effect on September 1. American buyers of Chinese goods subject to the new tariffs were likely to have filled their inventories as much as possible before the goods became more expensive to import.

Furthermore, the much-reported 3.8 per cent depreciation of the yuan in August failed to stop the decline in exports - despite Washington’s fears that it was being used to give China’s exporters an unfair advantage.

It is a far cry from the double-digit expansion that characterised the export machine that powered the Chinese economy for more than two decades.

Overall in August, the value of China’s total import and export was US$394.76 billion, down 3.2 per cent on a year earlier.

Imports also remain a huge cause of concern to policymakers in Beijing. They fell by 5.6 per cent in August after a 5.3 per cent decline in July. This was slightly better than the Bloomberg poll, which had predicted a 6.5 per cent contraction.

Chinese imports have now declined in every month of 2019 apart from April. To understand the scale of the import collapse, compare it to last year, when the average monthly growth was 16.6 per cent, with only a single negative reading, in December 2018.

Analysts have been raising concerns about China’s consumption levels for months, with retail sales underperforming and various bouts of government stimulus failing to kick-start purchases of big ticket items such as cars. The sluggish imports suggest the government support has yet to trickle into the real economy.

The import slump also points to a downturn in the manufacturing sector: many of China’s imports are components ordered by factories, often for use in goods for export. In the most recent official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index, a gauge of factory owners’ sentiment, export orders remained in negative territory for the 15th month in a row.

Overall, China’s trade surplus in August was US$34.84 billion, down from US$41.61 billion in July and behind analysts’ expectation for US$44.25 billion. However, this was an increase of 32.5 per cent on a year earlier, according to a release from the National Bureau of Statistics on Sunday.

In a report released on Thursday, the Institute of International Finance, an organisation of bankers based in Washington, had said that China’s surplus over the first half of the year had hit record highs, despite the ongoing trade war.

“Meanwhile, our proxy for China’s underlying trade surplus, which controls for commodity prices by excluding oil and iron ore, was the highest ever in the first half of 2019,” read the report.

“Perhaps more surprising, given repeated rounds of tariffs, is that China’s exports remain robust. Part of the resilience in China’s exports reflects a shift in composition, away from the US and towards the euro zone and other economies in Asia, including Vietnam,” the authors said.

Top negotiators from China and the US are set to meet in early October for their first face-to-face talks since August.
 
... related to the post right above:
12:15, 08-Sep-2019
China's exports up 2.6 percent in August, imports down 2.6 percent
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China's exports of goods rose 2.6 percent year on year in August, while imports fell 2.6 percent, customs data showed on Sunday.

Trade surplus stood at 239.6 billion yuan (about 33.79 billion U.S. dollars) last month, expanding 41.8 percent from one year earlier, according to data released by the General Administration of Customs (GAC).

The country's foreign trade climbed 3.6 percent year on year in the first eight months of 2019, with its trade surplus widening 46 percent during the period.

The European Union remained as China's largest trading partner during the period, with bilateral trade volume up 9.7 percent from one year earlier to 3.15 trillion yuan, followed by the ASEAN, up 11.7 percent to 2.74 trillion yuan, and the United States, down nine percent to 2.42 trillion yuan.

China's trade with the Belt and Road countries totaled 5.83 trillion yuan for the January-August period, up 9.9 percent year on year, 6.3 percentage points higher than the overall pace, said the GAC, adding that the amount accounted for 29 percent of China's total trade volume.
 
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