Tag Archives: Hong Kong

Will Asia Catch Back Up in 2022?

January 4, 2022 By in Asia, Australia, China, Communist Party, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Geopolitics, Hong Kong, Investment, Politics, Real Estate, Stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For Asia, 2021 was tease. It was a year that often promised something better, only to deliver everything worse. It’s hard to escape the feeling at the end of the year that we are back in much the same position as when it began.

This story originally appeared on Jan. 3, 2021 on TheStreet.com and its subscription service Real Money. Click here for the original story.

Will 2022 see the Asia Pacific region finally escape its cycle of opening up, then locking down again? There were tentative attempts to welcome foreign visitors once again in countries like Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. That gave way to a hellish pattern of waves of virus washing over the region, with all the travel bans, curfews and stay-at-home orders that unfold in response. Asia’s production schedules and shipments have been heavily disrupted as a result.

China persists in its zero-Covid strategy, an ultimately impractical approach that is exported to Hong Kong as East Asia’s financial hub attempts to open the mainland borders. Anyone returning from overseas must spend three weeks in an expensive hotel. China will likely maintain its position at least until the “coronation” of President Xi Jinping for a third term. That will come in the power reshuffling confirmed during the weeklong 20th National Congress, the latest in a series of once-every-five-years major meetings that is due to happen in October or November. March will see the growth target set at the annual National People’s Congress.

Before that, the Beijing winter Olympics will go ahead from February 4-20 in front of Chinese spectators, if all goes to plan. The winter events will make Beijing the first city to host both summer and winter games. But the political undercurrents are strong. The Olympics will go ahead minus diplomatic delegations from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, in protest of the human-rights violations in China’s westernmost Xinjiang province, and the death of civic society here in Hong Kong. China says those politicians weren’t invited in the first place…

Other governments in the Asia Pacific region, led in this regard by Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, appear willing to try something other than “zero Covid.” Ratchet up the vaccine rate, do your best to protect and triple-jab the vulnerable, and learn to “live with Covid.” This seems the sensible approach.

When you look at the 26.9% gain for the S&P 500 in 2021, the 21.0% gains for the Eurozone stocks in the Euro Stoxx 50 index, and the 14.3% advance in London’s FTSE 100 index, it has been a disappointing year for Asian equities. There’s scope for them to gain ground in relative terms.

The S&P Asia Pacific Broad Market Index, which tracks developed markets in Asia, posted a loss for 2021, down 0.6%. But that was a better showing than the S&P Asia Pacific Emerging BMI, which netted a 2.3% decline for the year. China-linked plays had a torrid time.

There were solid gains for the Tokyo market, with the broad Topix index up 10.4% for the year. But it was a tougher time for export-oriented companies, as reflected in the poorer 4.9% showing for the Nikkei 225, which tracks big-caps and multinationals. Those kinds of companies should benefit in the year ahead from a weaker yen, as the Fed boosts the dollar by raising rates.

I’ve indicated before that the Japan market will be a safe haven in 2022. We can be certain that the central Bank of Japan will maintain its exceedingly easy monetary policy, with Japanese interest rates still negative at -0.10%. Inflation is not a concern, as yet, in Japan – in fact, it is desirable. The central bank and the government have struggled to achieve a 2% inflation target since setting that as a goal way back in 2013.

The Japanese economy should post strong (for it) growth of 3.2% in 2022, according to IMF estimates, up from 2.4% last year. It’s a similar pace of growth as you’d find in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all typically more dynamic in recovery mode. Underpinning it all, the Japanese government under new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida passed a record US$490 billion stimulus spending package in November, bucking the trend toward tapering in other developed markets.

Value Partners, the Hong Kong-based asset manager, indicates that “investor sentiment towards Japan remains weak, and needs time to pick up,” it states in its 2022 market outlook. “Corporate earnings will likely continue to recover and we view that Japan will be one of the very few countries that will continue to have earnings upgrades.”

Australian stocks also delivered steady if not stellar performance, with the S&P/ASX 200 index up 13.0%. “With pent-up demand following Q3 lockdowns, a high vaccination rate, elevated confidence and rebounding mobility, the stage is set for a strong six months” in Australia, Nomura predicts in its global economic outlook for 2022.

Singapore’s Straits Times index didn’t quite post double-digit gains, up 9.8% in 2021. Like Australia, Singapore is now exceptionally poised having vaccinated the vast majority of its populace. The jobs market is improving, while the strength of high-end manufacturing and pharmaceuticals should stand the city-state in good stead for the year ahead. It’s a likely outperformer.

The problems with supply chains globally hurt South Korea, where the Kospi advanced only 3.6% all year. Despite the heavy influence of semiconductor producers on the Seoul market, electronics- and tech-related exporters did not experience the stellar kind of year they had in 2020, when the world couldn’t get enough gadgets to keep people company in lockdown.

Korea will have presidential elections in March, which add an element of uncertainty to the market. The central Bank of Korea also became the first in Asia to raise rates back in August, did so again in November, and will likely continue to tighten throughout 2022 to combat rising prices and home-price inflation. Rates may rise to 1.5% by the end of the year. That makes it a hard market to like for now, with South Korea’s highly indebted population sure to struggle under straightened circumstances. There’s pressure on the Seoul home market, where prices have doubled in the last five years.

The strongest showing in Asia came in India, where the Sensex posted a 21.7% gain for 2021, with the Nifty 50 up 23.8%. In fact, it’s been a very strong showing by the Mumbai market since the original depths of the first wave of Covid back in March 2020. The Indian market has more than doubled since then, with the Sensex up 111.1%.

That’s come on the back of breakneck growth, the world’s strongest major economy with a pace of 9.5% in 2021, likely to moderate to 8.5% in 2022. Reflecting that slowdown, Indian equities have flagged since mid-October, down 5.7% in the last 10 weeks of the year, so there’s no surging strength to carry them into the new year.

“While India enjoys a long-term secular bull market with expanding new-economy sectors, and is still in the upward profit cycle, we are cautious as valuations are at extreme levels versus the rest of Asia,” Value Partners notes.

Taiwan also outperformed as a market, a rare year when it did not move in lockstep with South Korea. The Taiex index added 23.7%, with electronics makers booking strong orders. Taiwanese companies also benefitted from sanctions and restrictions on some mainland Chinese manufacturers. In Taipei, retail traders became very active in the market, and have not been hampered by the higher rates seen in Korea. The Taiwanese central bank may start to raise rates next year, which could stem the tide of retail flows.

There was a narrow 0.2% loss in the Philippines, where the process of vaccinating 110 million people across 7,000 islands proving exceptionally difficult. The task is even more trying in the world’s largest archipelago, Indonesia, with the world’s fourth-largest population of 274 million people spread across 17,000 islands.

The commodities boom and increased digitalization of the Indonesian economy drove the Jakarta market up 10.1% in 2021. Vaccination rates and the success of “back to normal” business will dictate the future direction of equities in both island nations this year.

More than anything, 2021 became the year that the full vulnerability of investors in China was exposed. A series of sudden, overnight regulatory actions made it eminently clear that the Chinese Communist Party puts its own interests and its diktats over the Chinese people far above any common capitalist concerns about investor protection.

First, the for-profit tutoring industry was essentially banned. Then young people were restricted to at most three hours of videogame playing over the weekend. Next came an assault on Big Tech, with all China’s largest tech companies called in for a dressing down, and ordered to change their ways. Most recently, the country has started revising its securities laws to restrict how and where Chinese companies can go public.

Caught in the crossfire were the poor investors who bought into the “China story,” such as those who subscribed to the international offering of DiDi Global, the Chinese ride-haling market leader. Its business should be a huge growth market – scratch that, it is a huge growth market. But DiDi ran afoul of rules that didn’t exist, fulfilling the requirements of securities regulators for a foreign listing but failing to appease the newly-powerful, previously obscure cyberspace-security review office.

DiDi saw its apps stripped from Chinese app stores, and was barred from signing up new customers. That tanked its business, with the company last week posting a US$6.3 billion loss for the first nine months of the year. And it tanked its stock, an immediate descent days after its June 30 listing that leaves it down 64.8% as of the end of the year.

So it was Chinese and Hong Kong stocks that saw the most-pessimistic mood all year. The CSI 300 index of the largest stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen fell 5.2% over the course of 2021.

Life was even worse here in Hong Kong, where the much-hated National Security Law continues to be used to pound pro-democracy activity, and anyone deemed “anti-patriotic.” The benchmark, the Hang Seng index, plunged 14.1% over the last 12 months.

Hong Kong’s mix of overseas-inclined Chinese companies, in particular those that also have U.S. listings, drew it down. The city also has a hefty influence from Chinese property developers. Many of those are in or on the brink of default, led by China Evergrande Group, which lost virtually all its value, down 88.8% over the last 12 months.

Hong Kong has been my home for the last 20 years, but it’s terrible to see it suffer so. We are walled in by excessive quarantine, treated to an East Germany-style police state, and are losing the international attractiveness that a once-free city has surrendered.

In Beijing, there is no sign that Chinese regulators will ease up their pressure on overleveraged developers. President Xi has cast scorn on investor-owners, repeating his insistence that “Houses are for living in, not for speculation.” This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, where the incredible unpredictability of the stock market leads anyone with any money to look to invest it in property, first and foremost.

Not that consolidation will be a bad thing in the long run in the property industry. There are too many Chinese developers, 103,262 of them as of 2020, the last count by Statista, a number that grew 21.1% in a decade. Fly-by-night behavior and overborrowing to fund rapid development drove land prices sky high, and homes in the biggest cities are the domain only of the wealthy.

But it is a painful correction as the model is disrupted of pre-selling flats off plan, then racing through development to the next project. Local and provincial governments have based their budgets on aggressive land sales projections, too, so there’s desperation at that level and reports of deep wage cuts among local Communist Party officials.

I don’t see any way to recommend Chinese stocks in 2022, except as a completely contrarian or bottom-feeding play. They are too unpredictable at this stage. Someone is going to make a lot of money when Alibaba Group Holding rebounds. It’s an extremely profitable company that saw its share price fall 47.8% in 2021 in a move that had nothing to do with its fundamentals. But a bet on the company is essentially a bet on what kinds of regulations the Chinese government will implement, without warning. It is not your conventional rebound story.

If you know what social changes Beijing is going to push next, and which companies it will target, perhaps you can make that kind of call. If not, there are better places to invest your money where you can be sure your ownership is valued, protected, and means something.

Have I Been Given a Dodgy Pfizer Shot in Hong Kong?

March 24, 2021 By in Asia, Business, China, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Hong Kong, Investment, Stock market, Vaccine Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Lies, damn lies, and statistics in the vaccine age, as Hong Kong and Macau stop administering the Pfizer/BioNTech drug.

This story first appeared on TheStreet.com on Wednesday, March 24, 2021.

I’ve been given a dodgy vaccine dose.

Hong Kong and Macau have today suspended delivery of the Pfizer/BioNTech/Fosun shots. The Chinese local distributor, Fosun, requested the halt of the first batch of the vaccine to reach these shores. Batch 210102 consists of 585,000 doses. Eight days ago, I got one.

The markets moved on the suspension. The Hang Seng Index opened slightly lower after yesterday’s 0.8% drop in the S&P 500. But as morning word broke of the vaccine halt, the Hang Seng faltered, ending Wednesday down 2.0% at its lowest level in more than 10 weeks. The Hong Kong benchmark is now in a technical correction. It has fallen 10% since a February 17 peak.

Now, I’m not too worried. About the vaccine, at least. I’m worried the negative news will delay shots getting into arms, and ultimately the economic opening up of Hong Kong and Asia in general.

There have been reports of “more than 50” instances of defective packaging for the Pfizer drug made by front-line nursing staff. Those reported defects include cracks in the tops of the glass vials, leaks, or stains on the outside. There’s no apparent safety threat.

The defective doses have been thrown out. Fosun, which received the packaging complaints, wrote to the governments in Hong Kong and Macau, telling them to suspend use of the drug as a precaution. It’s undecided how long the suspension will last. Fosun distributes the drug in China, while Pfizer sends it around the rest of the world.

The sudden halting of the BioNTech vaccine will raise further doubts in the minds of a Hong Kong public that is already highly skeptical about getting inoculated, as I explained before I got my shot. The Pfizer/BioNTech drug is one of only two available so far in Hong Kong. The administration of the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine can continue.

We need to be very careful about how we respond to such reports. The tendency, as I exaggerated at the start of this article, is to think “Oooh, vaccine, dodgy.” AstraZeneca (AZN) is contending with far worse such misperceptions. The authorities should investigate if the Pfizer doses already administered have had the right strength.

I was, by chance, asked to provide some media training today for a major fund manager. The media coaching is something that I do very occasionally, when my corporate news sources request it. Here I was, giving the reporter’s eye view to companies administering their PR.

My early comments focused on three biases that are prevalent in today’s media: negative news bias (we remember bad news better), availability bias (we ascribe greater importance to news we’ve recently read) and confirmation bias (we seek out, by choice of news source or through algorithmic suggestions, news stories and data that support what we already believe).

The halting of the vaccines has Availability Bias written all over it. So, too, do the issues over the AstraZeneca jab concerning both blood clots in Europe and the veracity of its 79% efficacy rate.

An easy way of thinking about the combination of these biases: You never read about a plane that doesn’t crash.

It’s an exaggeration, we have all probably read a story about a pimped-out Gulfstream or a stealth bomber or two. We just remember the plane crashes.

Nevertheless, there have been an average of 14 fatal accidents for commercial and cargo planes globally per year over the last five years, according to the Aviation Safety Network, resulting in 345 deaths per year. In 2020, there were five commercial passenger-plane accidents, killing 299 people.

There were 42,060 people who died in vehicle crashes in the United States alone in 2020. The pandemic and empty roads seem to have encouraged reckless driving: the figure was up 8% over 2019, and the highest since 2007, even though people drove 13% less. What’s more, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven spiked 24%, the largest annual jump ever, since the National Safety Council started collecting data in 1923. Speed, drugs and perhaps empty roads coupled with a deadly pandemic that encourage reckless behavior are factors.

Hardly anyone is afraid of hopping in a car. Plenty of people are terrified to fly. Yet even when you break it down into accidents per mile travelled, driving is far more dangerous.

It is far more dangerous to get Covid than to get a Covid vaccine. Covid is killing more than 20,000 people per week in Europe. Controversially, it might have been advisable for Europe to continue to give people the AstraZeneca vaccine even if they knew it was causing dangerous blood clots… but on further investigation, and to the best of our knowledge, it is not, anyway.

I need to write “to the best of our knowledge,” because we’re handling a health emergency in real time. The newly developed drugs involve vaccines developed in a year, when the process normally takes a decade. We have learnt a lot about Covid over the course of the pandemic, and will continue to learn about both it and the drugs designed to contain it.

Many European nations screeched to a halt with their AstraZeneca programs when the red flag was raised over concerns about suspiciously timed blood clots. At that time, there were 18 cases of cerebral sinus vein thrombosis, of which one was fatal, out of 20 million people vaccinated in Europe. That’s 0.00009% blood clots, and 0.000005% that were fatal.

Random chance determines that some people are going to get blood clots, and that seems to be what has been going on, although the clotting issue is still being investigated. In fact, the number of blood clots was lower than average in the general population, AstraZeneca says. But blood clots have become the plane crashes of the vaccine age.

Here in Hong Kong, I can tell you every single case of hospitalization after someone got a vaccine. On Monday, the latest info available, there were 20 people taken to hospital after receiving a dose, as this daily report outlines. “A female aged 58 suffered from dizziness,” one report starts. “A male aged 46 suffered from palpitation and increase in blood pressure,” another begins. “A female aged 20 suffered from loss of consciousness and abdominal pain,” and so on.

While this public record may be necessary, it also isn’t all that useful. What we want to know is, did the vaccine cause those effects? Did the person faint or get high blood pressure because they were stressed out? As a direct result of the drug? Because they don’t like needles? Or because they watched a scary movie on their phone while they waited?

Our Negative News Bias tells us it’s directly because of the vaccine drug. Our Availability Bias tells us everyone feels faint, when in fact 20 Hong Kongers had typically very minor reactions out of 23,400 people who got a dose that day: 0.085%. And we don’t even know why those 0.085% of people had that response. Confirmation bias tells anti-vaccers they were right all along.

The Hong Kong government reports that around 403,000 people have so far been vaccinated against Covid-19. Of those, 150,200 received the BioNTech vaccine, and 252,800 got the Sinovac jab. So about one-quarter of the original BioNTech Batch 210102 has been administered. The second Batch 210104 of 758,000 doses is all in storage.

The Sinovac numbers are higher because it was available first, and was for a while the only anti-Covid dose you could get. Mainland China is encouraging people to get a Chinese-made vaccine if they want streamlined entry to China, even though a Chinese vaccine is not available in many places, including the United States.

The BioNTech vaccine has been proving far more popular with the folks I know. Yesterday, about twice as many people signed up for the BioNTech/Pfizer shot as the Sinovac option. Its 95% efficacy figures are far higher than for Sinovac, which has variously been cited as 50.4% effective in Brazil, 65.3% in Indonesia and 91.3% in Turkey. The World Health Organization suggests a minimum efficacy of 50% – meaning 50 out of 100 people have total immunity – for a vaccine to be approved.

I’ve already indicated that I do not think the Sinovac drug should have been cleared in Hong Kong. The company has not released its clinical trials data to the public. It has not been properly peer reviewed. Hong Kong has broken its own public health rules to approve the drug, desperate to get a Chinese alternative into arms first before any “foreign” drug.

The 95% efficacy rate of the Pfizer/BioNTech drug has yet to be challenged. Should these defect reports dent its reputation in the public eye? According to the Hong Kong director of health, there have been eight incidents of cracked BioNTech vials, 22 air-pressure issues leading to leaks, 16 reports of vial seals being loose, and 11 cases of stains or marks on the outside.

That’s 57 incidents out of a batch of 585,500 doses. That’s a rate of 0.0097%. I like those odds. I’ve got an appointment to get my second dose three weeks after the first – assuming that this temporary halt in the vaccine program lifts.

It’s an appointment I intend to keep.

Vaccine Skepticism May Hold Back Asian Recovery

March 24, 2021 By in China, Communist Party, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Geopolitics, Hong Kong, Stock market, Vaccine Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Getting international travel and commerce back on track may hinge on vaccine acceptance.

This story first appeared on TheStreet.com on Monday, March 15, 2021

I’m due to go get my COVID-19 vaccination, the first jab, Tuesday. But I’m one of the few and the brave in Hong Kong.

There has been apathy, antipathy and resistance to vaccinations in Hong Kong, resulting in a very slow take-up. Only around 5% of the eligible population of Hong Kongers has taken advantage of the free program. According to one doctor, 40% of the people who have actually reserved their injection do not show up.

It’s understandable that there’s skepticism about a new vaccine, developed at record pace. I get it. A process that normally takes a decade took a year. It took me a day to make up my mind.

But the main detriment to the initiative in Hong Kong has been coverage of six deaths in the city of people who have taken the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac. That has dampened any enthusiasm that may have existed — and that was in shorter supply than doses anyway.

Oh, and the Sinovac vaccine should not be approved in Hong Kong, in my view. The health authorities here are not following their own rules, and have passed a special exemption to get the drug cleared for use, against protocol. Ordinarily, any drug would have to have its clinical-trial results published, and peer reviewed in medical journals. But that has not occurred.

The maker of the drug, Sinovac Biotech, has not released the data. Quite why, I don’t know, but we can all have our suspicions. The most innocent explanation is that there are no longer enough COVID-19 cases within China to make a large enough sample of patients. The Beijing-based company has struggled to conduct its own research in its home market.

But Sinovac is being used and tested in Brazil. Researchers there said in mid-January that the Sinovac vaccine was only 50.4% effective, when you include mild infections. They initially gave a 78% efficacy rate, but then admitted it does not include patients who still caught the virus but had “very mild infections.”

The World Health Organization sets a minimum standard that a vaccine must have an efficacy of at least 50% for it to qualify. The figure means that of 100 people given the vaccine, 50 are guaranteed not to get it at all, while the other 50 may or may not, and may have a milder version of the disease if they do.

Indonesia also ran trials on Sinovac, and found it to be 65.3% effective. The highest efficacy came from tests in Turkey, where researchers said it proved 91.3% effective, both nations reporting interim results from late-stage trials.

If you’re being charitable, you’ll chalk up Sinovac Biotech’s inability to publish its results to the difficulties of squaring away research from all over the world. If you’re being suspicious, you may wonder what kind of side effects and hospitalizations are contained in the figures they undoubtedly have.

One Hong Kong doctor here joked that the Hong Kong population is taking part in another phase of Sinovac’s late-stage trials, without knowing it. We chuckle, knowing there’s a grain of truth.

Hong Kongers, for a population that thrives on a famously entrepreneurial and risk-taking economy, are surprisingly risk-averse in their daily life. Widespread, mild hypochondria has stood them in good stead in the face of an unknown disease. Mask wearing and social distancing took off right away, even before “social distancing” became a thing.

It is not going to help the vaccine program. On top of that, every death or hospitalization of someone who has taken a COVID-19 jab gets blown up in the city’s tabloids. The first two deaths, the authorities said on investigation, were coincidence. “Natural” heart attacks are gonna happen if you inject a lot of people, just like some will die in car crashes. Now we have six coincidences …

There’s a political angle to the vaccines, undoubtedly. We have two vaccines available, the Chinese one with insufficient data and a Western one with data supplied.

Hong Kong did not start administering any vaccines until it was able to give out a Chinese-made one, rushing through Sinovac with incomplete and non-public testing data. Only then could the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that the city had reserved be flown in. Another standard for the Hong Kong drug authorities is that the drug be approved elsewhere in reputable markets, and the Pfizer drug had been given the seal of approval in Britain and the United States.

Here in Hong Kong it is not the “Pfizer drug.” The name Pfizer (PFE) is nowhere to be found. This is the BioNTech/Fosun drug, which has the made-up drug name of Comirnaty, as you can see from the Hong Kong booking form. A subsidiary of the conglomerate Fosun International (FOSUF) gets involved. And yes, Comirnaty is the exact same one that Pfizer makes.

BioNTech is the brains behind Comirnaty, the first mRNA vaccine ever to get approved anywhere in the world, when Britain gave it the all-clear. Pfizer was pulled in to help commercialize and mass produce the drug. It contains a molecule of a type called messenger RNA that carries instructions to make a protein that can bind with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Unlike a conventional vaccine, the kind we have all taken for polio or smallpox, it does not contain any of the virus itself, which is present in “old-fashioned vaccines,” in a weakened or denatured state.

Pretty smart, huh? I think of it like a Trojan Horse of a drug. That’s not quite right, it’s sending your body a message to generate body doubles so that when the virus arrives, it gets confused, and attacks the dummy instead.

Why has Pfizer been erased? All pharmaceuticals companies have to have a Chinese joint venture to sell drugs in China. That’s where Fosun Pharma, the largest drugmaker in China, comes in.

I was worried this partnership would mean the drug will be made in China. But BioNTech will be making the drug in Europe, at production bases in Germany and Belgium, with Fosun acting as distributor as well as conducting the regulatory applications and marketing in China.

Pfizer is BioNTech’s global partner — except in China. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, whose every uttering seems politically calibrated to please Beijing, says Pfizer is a “co-supplier” alongside Fosun Pharma.

Fortunately, it’s the same drug, and that’s the one I’ll be getting. I would in no circumstances whatsoever get the Sinovac drug that has been approved when it shouldn’t have been approved, in my view. The Pfizer drug has peer-reviewed data showing it’s 95% effective, as per the E.U. product factsheet.

For Sinovac, Hong Kong health authorities say they’ve seen some but not all of the numbers. Yet again, they have also not released them to the public, or said which numbers they’ve seen. On top of that, Hong Kong health authorities are giving the Sinovac drug to all ages, from 18 and up. Even in mainland China, it is not given to people over 60.

Numbers out of China are often, well, just numbers. One friend of mine who runs a business says most Chinese companies have two sets of books, one with financials they show to the public or partners, and another that give the real picture. He insists his company does not!

We have an added layer of politics involved. China is keen to build a medical database and has used a “voluntary” program to collect biometrics including DNA and facial-recognition scans from the Uighur population in Xinjiang. This “health check” info can and will be used by the Communist authorities. Folks mistrust the Hong Kong government badly enough to expect them to do the same.

Then of course the entire world has to contend with anti-vaccer misinformation. Much of that stems from a completely discredited piece of research indicating that there’s a link between the measles/mumps/rubella shot and autism.

THIS IS NOT TRUE, people! The concept was based on a discredited piece of research unfortunately published in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet, in 1998. The journal retracted it partially in 2004 and completely in 2010.

The damage, however, was done, or at least the info was out there on the Internet. An article in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy, another peer-reviewed journal, calls the alleged autism-vaccine connection “perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.”

I’m no scientist, but I trust that the medical establishment has been working double and triple time on COVID-19. A 95% efficacy on the Pfizer/BioNTech shot hasn’t been shot down. And with just about all the vaccines, “efficacy” in medical terms of granting complete immunity is different from “efficacy” in real-life terms. It is rare for people given any COVID-19 vaccine to get hospitalized.

I’ve noticed that expatriates in Hong Kong appear more willing to get vaccinated. This may be because they’re keen to travel. China’s very slow take-up on vaccinations is likely to hamper efforts to deploy its newly introduced “vaccine passport,” which also raises a lot of concerns over health-record privacy and sharing that information between governments.

In the United States, a commendable 32 doses per 100 people has been administered (not quite 32% vaccination because some people might have had a second shot). In China, the figure is 3.8 doses per 100 people.

It’s a very personal decision whether to get the shot or not. I understand, I’ll reiterate, if people hesitate about adopting this new technology. I don’t buy the first generation of a new phone or computer, and when I once did, it broke quicker than I expected.

Tuesday, I’ll try the new technology. I put my faith that the medical community has been working double, triple, quadruple time to get this right. Any company that produces a faulty vaccine would be destined for the scrapheap.

The medical community has been fooled before, yes. See MMR-autism, above. I’ll set this skepticism aside. I have kids, I meet a lot of people that I don’t want to infect. It’s the right thing, I feel, to do. One small shot for my arm, a giant leap of faith for mankind.

Asian Markets Rally on Biden Victory

November 10, 2020 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This story first appeared on TheStreet.com.

https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/global-equity/asian-markets-rally-on-biden-victory-15482906

Asian stock markets are breathing a sigh of relief on Monday, now that the result of the U.S. presidential election is clear. It’s a sea of green for Asian indexes on my screen.

Trade-heavy markets in particular such as China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea are seeing their stocks climb higher in hopes that Biden will take a less-confrontational, more-constructive approach on trade.

The U.S. dollar is also losing ground. The Chinese yuan is hitting a 28-month peak, the Korean won is climbing to its highest level since February 2019, and the Singapore dollar is rising to its highest level so far this year.

The Indonesian rupiah, which in March weakened to levels last seen during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998, is also gaining ground. Investors look willing to take on more risk now that the U.S. election has passed, with emerging markets prime beneficiaries.

The Nikkei 225 in Japan is Asia’s biggest gainer on Monday, traditional Japanese industrial companies seeing their shares rise 2.1%, although the broad Topix index of all major stocks in Japan finished with a more-muted 1.4% advance.

The other major gains came for the CSI 300 of the largest stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen, which ended up 2.0%, with the Stock Exchange of Thailand index also finishing up 2.0%.

Some of the response is simply a relief rally with the uncertainty of the U.S. election now behind markets. But Asian economies are expected to gain ground with Biden likely to de-escalate tensions on trade, while U.S. monetary policy is set to expand stimulus and therefore weaken the U.S. dollar.

Trump’s very first action on taking office was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP, a bid to create the world’s largest trade bloc, subsumed bilateral negotiations between the United States and Japan. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expended considerable political capital getting the influential Japanese farming lobby to agree to the deal, only to be left jilted at the altar by Trump, an ally he had courted immediately upon Trump’s successful election.

Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga, will now engage with Trump’s successor. It will be interesting to see the future direction of the “Quad” alliance that has brought together Japan, the United States, India and Australia, with the unstated aim of containing China’s rising influence in Asia.

Biden may now seek to join the TPP’s successor, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the remaining 11 nations agreed. Biden has certainly pledged, on his first day, to sign the United States back up to the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Biden may be more effective in building diplomatic alliances, whereas Trump alienated many traditional U.S. allies. Australian shares had their best session since the virus-related downturn in March, the S&P/ASX 200 ending up 1.8% and the NZX 50 in New Zealand finishing with a 1.8% gain as well.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have yet to reach out to congratulate Biden on his victory. Trump had also expressed admiration for other authoritarian strongmen such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the Saudi Arabian king and crown prince, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. As of Monday afternoon Asian time, all those leaders have stayed silent on Biden’s election. It has been a useful exercise for anti-democratic regimes to point to the “chaos” of the U.S. electoral process as a way of bolstering their own governance.

The state-owned Global Times mouthpiece used to push Beijing’s foreign-policy agenda says in an editorial that Biden may go further in pushing China on human rights over the pro-democracy crackdown in Hong Kong and the concentration camps for Uighur Muslim minority citizens built in the western province of Xinjiang.

At the same time, the state-owned paper says it may be possible to pop the “bubbles” of pressure created by outgoing President Donald Trump in the election campaign. “Beijing should undertake to communicate with the Biden team as thoroughly as it can, making greater joint efforts to recover China-U.S. relations to a state of great predictability,” the editorial states.

Trump was bipolar on China, saying that he and Chinese counterpart Xi “love each other,” but equally using China as a convenient, little-known and far-off foe, to drum up votes. He was right to push China on the origins of the coronavirus, which had the central Chinese city of Wuhan as its epicenter. China has done its very best to stop efforts to examine just how the outbreak began, undermining efforts by the World Health Organization to present impartial evidence, and blocking efforts to send WHO scientists to Wuhan itself.

It is hard to imagine that Biden administration will act “tougher” over China, the Global Times states, though the Democratic Party is “more stubborn about values.” Biden is highly likely to continue the “maximum pressure” campaign of his administration, only “probably not with reckless gambling-style moves,” the editorial states.

India is cheering the election of Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother’s family trace their roots to southern Tamil Nadu province. Half-Indian, half-Jamaican by parentage, Harris visited India frequently in her youth. While she will surely seek to bolster India’s position as an American ally, she may also push right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his treatment of non-Hindu citizens, and human rights. The Sensex main stock index in India was up 1.4% in afternoon trade.

Here in Hong Kong as well as in Taiwan, we will wait to see how Biden approaches diplomacy over our efforts to maintain autonomy in the face of pressure from Beijing.

Taiwan, a Democratic nation that has put in place one of the world’s most-effective programs to combat the coronavirus, remains blocked by mainland China from joining the World Health Assembly and the WHO. Taiwan’s foreign ministry says it has been excluded from a World Health Assembly meeting that starts today and runs all week on instructions from China. The WHO’s exclusion of Taiwan is purely on political and not on public-health grounds, undermining the group’s whole mission.

Trump accepted a call of congratulation from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen after he won election, an unprecedented move. It is not clear if Biden will do the same. As Taiwanese lawmakers fret that Biden will be more China-friendly, the head of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, Chen Ming-tong, has told them there’s “no need to worry,” that while the White House’s tactics may change toward China, “there will be no change in its China strategy.”

‘The End of Hong Kong’ in New Treason Law

May 22, 2020 By in Business, China, Communist Party, Hong Kong, Stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
‘The End of Hong Kong’ in New Treason Law

Beijing has given up playing the game of pretending that Hong Kong is governing itself. You could potentially be charged under the city’s new national-security law.

China’s showcase political conflab, the National People’s Congress, began today. First item on the agenda? A full-frontal attack on Hong Kong freedoms.

The second order of business was an item of non-business. Premier Li Keqiang opted not to set a growth target for 2020, something that’s always established when the meeting normally meets in March.

It had planned to set a rate of “about 6%.” But the uncertainties surrounding the Covid-19 recovery and global growth, not to mention the rekindled U.S.-China trade war, have scotched all that.

That first item is sending Hong Kong stocks south, with the Hang Seng plummeting 4.6% in early afternoon trade. The benchmark started lower, and just keeps going down. Shareholders should be very worried about their holdings in Hong Kong.

Chinese shares are also dragged down, with the CSI 300 of largest stocks in Shanghai and Shenzhen down 1.6%. There should be intense political pressure on China over this issue. We will see how far Britain and the United States are prepared to push Beijing over rights when money and trade is at stake.

Don’t be fooled by the coverage of this issue, which mainly indicates that a “controversial” new law has been proposed.

It’s not just controversial, it’s illegal. Pro-democracy lawmaker Dennis Kwok is only slightly exaggerating that “This is the end of Hong Kong.” It means Beijing will directly rule Hong Kong.

When China got its hands on Hong Kong in 1997, it promised that the former British territory would be allowed to keep its laws and operate autonomously for 50 years, until 2047. It signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration to that effect, a legal contract lodged with the United Nations. Hong Kong also established its constitution, the Basic Law, and elected its own government.

That government decides Hong Kong’s laws. It says so in the Basic Law. The government is stacked to Beijing’s favor, with half its members appointed rather than elected. Even then, the pro-Beijing camp struggle to shove through their legislation.

With this new law, the mainland government is simply enacting a new law of its own directly, in Beijing, and imposing it on Hong Kong. It plans to write the new “security” law into the Hong Kong constitution directly, bypassing the Hong Kong government altogether.

So Beijing is dispensing with any pretence that Hong Kong governs itself. It says it got “frustrated” with waiting for the proper legal process to occur.

It would be, I suppose, similar to the federal government bypassing states altogether and writing a sedition law, perhaps with capital punishment, directly into the state constitution of all 50. It would mean the end of any power for state governments.

That is vitally important in the case of this new law. Hong Kong, which guarantees free speech, has a totally different view of what kind of conversations about the government are allowed. Mainland China restricts free speech massively, censors discussion, leaving no one comfortable in criticizing the Communist Party in public. You can get locked up for decades for doing so, potentially executed. The international coverage of this issue is being blacked out on TV screens and blocked online as I write.

I can currently criticize the Communist Party all I want, here in Hong Kong. With this new law, my ability to write these articles will be severely curtailed.

All this is being done under the guise of “national security,” the catch-all phrase beloved by dictators and authoritarian governments the world over. “National security is the bedrock underpinning the stability of the country,” Zhang Yesui, the spokesman for the National People’s Congress, said as the Communist Party’s flagship meeting kicked off on Friday.

It’s a poorly run, unstable and weak country if its bedrock is stopping criticism of that country. A proud, strong nation should be able to take criticism on the chin.

We don’t yet know what will be in the new law. The central government is today due to table a resolution to allow the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress to craft and pass the new national security law for Hong Kong. Translation: the rubber stamp government will approve the top leaders writing a treason law for Hong Kong.

The new law will ban secessionist and subversive activity, as well as foreign interference and terrorism, according to the sources at the South China Morning Post. So foreign entities and people can also be charged.

It presents a real dilemma for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He has delayed a report on how autonomous Hong Kong actually is until after this meeting in Beijing. He must certify an annual assessment that Hong Kong is self-governed enough to justify separate trade status. That is very much in doubt.

China is already referring to last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations as terrorism, and says anyone flying a foreign flag at a march is promoting Hong Kong independence. Of course, the Communist leaders are furious that people have been burning and stamping on the Chinese flag, booing the national anthem, and even breaking into the government chambers here to spray-paint over the Hong Kong flag.

Hong Kong’s constitution does state that the city has to pass a national security law, in its Article 23. So-called Article 23 legislation was put forward by the Hong Kong government in 2003, but pulled after 500,000 people marched in opposition to it in the streets.

Now the Beijing government has lost patience with playing the rigged game that it set up. It figures that it will simply directly rule Hong Kong in this case, banning criticism of itself, how China is governed, how Hong Kong is governed. Presumably you, in the United States, could be prosecuted for “foreign interference” should you criticize the party and step foot in Hong Kong.

So beware. This law really does mean the end of Hong Kong’s autonomy. It is dangerous for us all.

This story originally appeared on Real Money.

Australia and India Lead Mid-Week Selling for an Asia in Recession

March 20, 2020 By in Asia, Australia, Business, China, Communist Party, India, Investment, Politics, Stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

There are country-specific reasons why Australia, India and Thailand are leading Asia’s plunge, but the whole region is in recession, S&P correctly says.

The wildly unpredictable movements of equity markets continued apace on Wednesday. Despite the strong rally on U.S. markets the day before, when the S&P 500 rose 6%, almost all Asian markets again posted sizable losses here on Wednesday.

The biggest losers are in Australia and India. I’ll briefly explore why each of those two markets is performing particularly poorly.

In Australia, there are massive daily moves in either direction, sometimes even intraday. The S&P/ASX 200 was down 6.4% at the close Wednesday after posting its biggest single-day gain in 20 years on Tuesday. Now that gain has been wiped out! Since hitting a record high on Feb. 20, the index has corrected 31.2%.

Australian equities are dominated by the Big Four banks – Commonwealth Bank CMWAY, Westpac Banking (WBK) , ANZ ANZBY and NAB NABZY – all of which are seeing their shares oscillate as central banks shift policy globally. The Oz market also has a healthy dose of commodity stocks such as the gold miners BHP Group (BHP) and Rio Tinto (RIO) , and commodities are getting crushed, even gold. There’s also a hefty listed real estate sector and renters are going to start struggling to pay up. Oh, and let’s not forget that Australia’s main customer is China, which isn’t buying.

India follows suit

Indian shares again sold off hard on Wednesday, with the Sensex down 5.6% at the close. Indian shares have now corrected 30.1% in the month since Feb. 19, one of the worst performances in Asia. Foreign institutional investors have been heavy sellers, placing a higher risk premium on Indian stocks than before the outbreak.

India only has 137 declared Covid-19 cases so far, and it’s a bit of a mystery why the world’s second-largest country by population has been spared so far. It may be that only a few people are being tested. While ultraviolet light does kill viruses in general, there has been no scientific proof that hot weather deters Covid-19, so it may be that developing markets that often are hot either haven’t been hit yet or tested well. Of course, developing nations will struggle the most in a health care sense if the disease sets in.

Here in Hong Kong, we’ve had virus cases confirmed among Hong Kong tourists returning from India trips. State governments in India are starting to shutter schools, malls, movie theaters and so on, an economic danger because domestic consumption accounts for around 60% of the economy. Travel and tourism, around 7.5% of GDP, will suffer immensely with tourism visas being cancelled.

There are some India-specific issues that add an extra layer of worry. Yes Bank, a private bank established in 2004 as an alternative to state-backed institutions, has collapsed and is being bailed out by the Reserve Bank of India, the nation’s central bank. Also, violent attacks against Muslim minority by radical Hindu nationalists have left scores dead. Those ethnic tensions are not going to be helped by any downward spiral in the economy.

It isn’t pretty elsewhere, either

While Australia and India have fared worst here on Wednesday, other markets alternate to outdo each other in poor performance. Japan was one of the only sources of green on screens, with the Topix up a narrow 0.2% on Wednesday after the Bank of Japan announced it will support the market by buying ETFs. But the Topix, a broad measure of all big Japanese stocks, is down 26.2% this year.

Thailand’s SET index has fallen 33.7% in 2020, by a small margin the worst year-to-date performance in Asia. Thailand gets 11% of its GDP from tourism, and that’s dead – technically, down 44% and getting worse. The Philippines, where stocks are down almost as much, 31.7% in 2020, has simply shut down its stock exchange, saying it couldn’t guarantee the health of folks on the floor. The blood pressure of investors is another health disaster altogether.

It’s going to take a coordinated global response when it comes to fiscal and monetary stimulus to get everyone on the same page. It also will take cooperation among medical bodies and addressing transportation links if we’re going to get out of the coronavirus mess. The unilateral, single-nation responses are firing buckshot when we need a .458 Winchester Magnum, the kind of Big Game rifle the ranger carries when I’ve been on walking safaris in South Africa.

Investors are sensibly responding to economic disruption rather than simply rates of infection. Korean stocks lost 4.9% in a market dominated by big exporters and heavy industry.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index closed down 4.2% on Wednesday, even though the rate of new infections is now slow in East Asia. Most of Hong Kong’s new cases are coming from abroad as Hong Kongers hurry home ahead of travel shutdowns around the globe. The Hang Seng hadn’t risen as high as other Asian indexes due to the pro-democracy protests here last year, so the benchmark is down “only” 20.9% in 2020.

Mainland China, where this all started, is seeing its stocks spared the worst of the selling. The CSI 300 index of the largest shares in Shanghai and Shenzhen fell 2.0% on Wednesday, and the whole index is down only 11.2% this year. That’s half the size of the general selloff around Asia. But treat Chinese share movements with skepticism. Domestic retail investors drive the trading and don’t have many other places to put their money. They are also notorious momentum traders. Mainland stocks are also essentially options on companies rather than genuine holdings, because Communist Party policy can change literally overnight without warning and shut your favorite company down. The party also has cash to spend on stimulus.

Recession is here

I was a guest on RTHK Radio 3’s drive-time business show “Money Talk” Tuesday morning, talking about the disastrous economic figures out of China on Monday. The jobless rate is at a record high, manufacturing has slowed a record amount, and retail sales cratered by a record margin.

One point I made is that, given the shutdowns already under way in Italy and Spain, we can expect similar figures out of those economies in the next month or two. And as more countries corral movement and stop public gatherings, we will see that economic pain spread.

So I chuckle a wry laugh when I hear forecasters predicting that we’re heading for recession. We are in recession, people! It’s here now.

The backward-looking economic output figures will confirm that assessment in the future. I hate the new piece of business jargon that an analyst is attempting to “nowcast” activity. But real-time assessments and common-sense assessments are what we need right now.

I’m digesting a particularly gloomy set of reports from Standard & Poor’s. The rating agency isn’t pulling any punches.

“Asia-Pacific Recession Guaranteed” is my light reading right now. It’s a quick hit. The “enormous first-quarter shock” in China means its growth will shudder to 2.9% in 2020, S&P says, a gutsy call because the Communist Party was keen on “predicting” growth of “around 6%.”

S&P is using the traditional definition of two down quarters in a row to define recession. By other measures, countries such as India and China need to achieve outsize growth just to keep the floods of people moving from the countryside to the city gainfully employed.

This new report says the “rising scale of the shock will leave permanent scars on balance sheets and in labor markets” in Asia. I concur. The rating agency believes US$400 billion in permanent income losses is going to be wiped off profit-and-loss statements.

S&P forecasts aggregate growth will fall by more than half in Asia to under 3% for all of 2020. It envisions a U-shaped recovery.

V-shaped, U-shaped, it’s all a question of how deep and how long this recession is going to last. All downturns are temporary unless you think the world economy is going to zero, which it’s not. But how bad will this get? We don’t know. The costs are continuing to add up, meaning we can’t count the final tab yet.

China Posts Worst Economic Performance on Record

March 20, 2020 By in Asia, Business, China, Communist Party, Geopolitics, Investment, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Monday’s numbers for production, retail sales and the jobless rate are all the worst on record for China. Asian shares continued heavy selling despite central-bank support. [This story first appeared on TheStreet.com.]

China has posted its worst production and sales figures on record on Monday, as a series of firsts continue to be set in Asia, almost all of them on the downside.

The economic numbers released on Monday are far worse than predicted by forecasters, indicating that China’s factories essentially shut up shop in the first two months of the year. Retailers stopped buying, too, e-commerce not able to offset the empty stores nationwide.

Industrial output fell 13.5% for the January-February period, from the prior year. That’s the worst reading on record since Reuters began tracking the figure in January 1990. A poll by the news agency had anticipated a 1.5% rise.

Retail sales plummeted 20.5%, also the first decline on record, despite an increase in online purchases of goods like groceries. Shopping malls and high streets have become ghost towns, and a logistics logjam due to a lack of delivery people has delayed e-commerce orders. A survey of economists by Bloomberg had anticipated only a 4.0% fall.

China’s unemployment rate has risen to 6.2% for February, up from 5.2% in December. That, too, is a record high jobless rate since the government started publishing figures.

Investment also sank 24.5% for the January-February period, the first drop in record, and far worse than the dip of 2.0% forecast by economists. (Combining the two months negates the impact of Lunar New Year, which fell in January in 2020 but February in 2019.) Investment into property, the holding of choice for wealthy Chinese citizens, shrank by its largest amount on record, and home prices stalled for the first time in five years.

Early predictions of the impact of the coronavirus suggested there would be a rapid V-shaped recovery in China. But the location of the virus outbreak in the “Chicago of China” rapidly impacted travel and trade. The epicenter, Wuhan, is a major inland port on the Yangtze River, as well as a north-south and east-west node on railway lines. It is the center of China’s auto manufacturing.

Economic figures for March may be even worse than those recorded for the first two months of the year. Consumer confidence has been shaken to its core, and it’s unclear what will encourage it to return.

Official figures claim that China registered only 16 new cases of the coronavirus on Sunday, and 12 of those stem from “imported” cases of people arriving from abroad. But with the country opening back up to human movement, there’s potential for a second outbreak. One Hong Kong news report out of Wuhan states that doctors there are releasing patients from temporary hospitals if a lung scan shows no scarring, without testing for the virus, since test kits have run low.

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, which centered on southern Guangdong Province as well as Hong Kong, China did not enter any significant lockdown. With the Covid-19 disease, the top leadership effectively ordered half the country’s 1.4 billion people to stay home. That has complicated the return of workers from the Lunar New Year, and only around 75% of Chinese companies are back in business.

The cessation of production is far more extreme than in 2003, hence the huge and unprecedented impact on industrial production. This has broad implications in the West. Even if demand returns around the world, that is no good if there is no supply of goods.

China’s efforts to get its economy firing on all cylinders are now going to be deterred by a lack of demand, too. The travel bans put in place around the world, and a rising number of lockdowns in major economies such as Italy and Spain, will only further dampen economic activity in Asia.

China’s top leaders were due to announce their “forecast” for full-year economic performance in 2020 at a meeting on March 5. But the event has been postponed due to the virus crisis. The Communist top brass had reportedly agreed a “target” of around 6% when they gathered late last year, and are now debating whether to lower that.

Hong Kong’s economy is also suffering through what amounts to a virtual shutdown. Figures released on Monday showed that there were only 199,000 tourist arrivals in February. That is normally the same number of tourists who arrive in a single day, equating to a 96% decrease. Even at the height of SARS, which centered on the city, 427,000 visitors arrived in the month of May.

The lessons learnt during SARS have however led to far fewer cases of Covid-19 occurring (so far) here in my hometown. Although Hong Kong is next to mainland China, it has only recorded 148 cases, far fewer even than Singapore, at 226, despite Hong Kong having a population that is 32% larger. Social distancing and staying at home, as well as a rapid response to track relatives and friends of those infected, seems to be working.

Asian markets continued their panic selling on Monday, despite moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve to slash interest rates, and an emergency meeting by the central Bank of Japan. New Zealand and South Korea also cut interest rates.

Australian stocks have crashed 9.7% on Monday, their biggest fall since “Black Monday” in 1987. That comes after an extraordinary day’s trade on Friday, which saw the S&P/ASX 200 fall 8.1% at the start, only to close with their strongest one-day gain in more than a decade, of 4.4%. Financial stocks led the selling on Monday, and investors will also have been unnerved by those historically bad activity numbers out of China, the largest source of demand for Australian exports.

Japan’s Topix declined 2.0%, despite BOJ action. The Japanese central bank moved up a policy meeting by two days, and agreed to purchase bonds and other financial instruments, as well as expand corporate finance.

Chinese shares fell 4.3% on Monday after the economic-output figures, and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 4.0%. Singapore’s Straits Times index lost 5.3%. Indian shares were the biggest fallers outside Australia, the Sensex down 7.9%.

Global Markets Finally Follow Asia’s Lead on Covid-19

March 12, 2020 By in Asia, Business, China, Communist Party, Investment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The coronavirus has finally infected global markets over the last two weeks. It’s taken a while to fester. But the outbreak has now spread from China’s CSI 300 to Asian, European and, finally, U.S. stocks.

I’ve been warning since Jan. 21 that a mystery SARS-like disease was hitting China, and likely to spread globally. The World Health Organization was due to meet the next day to decide if the outbreak is a “public health emergency of international concern.” I pre-empted that the answer is “Yes.”

The WHO ruled “No.” The Wuhan coronavirus is an emergency only for China, the global health body ruled on Jan. 22. How wrong they were.

Investors worldwide have had more than a month to prepare for this week’s selloff on global markets. Even while car factories in South Korea, Japan and Serbia were shuttered because they couldn’t get parts, U.S. stocks climbed toward all-time highs. Now the reality of worldwide manufacturing pain is sinking in.

Jaguar Land Rover’s CEO, Ralph Speth, expects the company to run out of some parts shortly. The British carmaker, a Tata Motors (TTM) subsidiary, says it has “flown parts in suitcases from China to the U.K.”

Isaac Larien, the CEO of Bratz dollmaker MGA Entertainment, says it has enough Chinese parts for another month. “The timing couldn’t be worse,” he told The Washington Post. “In 41 years in the toy business, this is the worst disaster I’ve seen.”

So I’ve been surprised it has taken this long for investors outside greater China to respond. Yes, China’s financial markets are ring-fenced, so there’s little direct connection from its A shares to other equities. But this infection in the “factory to the world” has had a severe effect in China, and I believe the supply-chain pain has only just begun.

Korean shares have fallen 18% since mid-February. Japanese stocks turned south earlier, but are now down 22.9% since the start of the year. Hong Kong stocks saw a short-lived rally, but are off 16.3% since virus concerns first got real in mid-January. So the radius of stock-market pain is expanding.

Nomura estimates today that 74.1% of Chinese businesses have resumed work after the Lunar New Year lockdown, and only 61.6% in the worst-affected areas. They base that off the Baidu Migration Index, which shows 49.2% of China’s population has returned to where it was pre-virus. Most migrant workers, in other words, have stayed put.

By the end of March, 91.8% of businesses outside Hubei Province should be operating, the Japanese investment bank predicts — quite optimistically, if you ask me. This crisis has already defied expectations.

Early comparisons looked at the impact of SARS in 2003. It made sense because the diseases are quite similar. SARS was short-lived, a deadlier virus that nevertheless only resulted in 813 fatalities globally. Economists and market watchers globally raced to release reports about a similar “V-shaped recovery” from Wuhan Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Given enough time, all recoveries are V-shaped. This is a little like warning that markets will be volatile. Yes, the WARS effects will not continue forever, and China’s economy is not going to slide into permanent decline. What’s yet to be determined is how deep and wide the V is.

It’s understandable that economists have been slow. They are better at explaining what’s happened than predicting what’s to come, particularly with an unpredictable disease. Yet simple math should have suggested a sizable impact from the Covid-19 virus hitting right as much of China was on the move for the most-important holiday of the year.

China has a much greater importance to the global economy now than in 2003. The Middle Kingdom’s economy stands at $14.2 trillion for 2019. It was one-quarter the size, $3.6 trillion, when SARS hit. China only began its economic opening up in earnest in 1997. So the country has also become far better-integrated into the global supply chain.

Likewise, common sense should have told the WHO to act earlier. Many people in Hong Kong fault the organization as being beholden to Chinese funding. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but the body has certainly bent over backward to praise China for its response, criticizing the rest of the world for lacking preparedness instead.

Not every nation can respond as China has, by locking down large proportions of its population. Nor should they.

Chinese authorities have carried out a remit to “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” a random dictum that’s sounds a lot like rounding up the usual suspects. As a result, authorities in the county of Tongbai have been training SWAT teams to noose, then hood uncooperative suspects who refuse to wear a mask. Each Chinese province is unleashing tens, even hundreds of thousands of tin-pot Communist Party local representatives or uniformed volunteers, based on a block-level grid system. Each one has their own crazy way of outcompeting the other to win what President Xi Jinping calls an all-out “people’s war” on the virus.

Consider the confusion in Wuhan. On Monday, the city government said non-residents were free to leave the city if they weren’t infected or under quarantine. By noon, that advisory was withdrawn. The city’s top brass said the announcement was “unauthorized,” and there was no change in the lockdown.

As a result, China is as much at war with its own people as the virus. Even after the immediate virus crisis passes, it may take months for those block-level dictators to relinquish their hold on the people and allow life to get back to normal. For now, you have “escapees” shinnying down drainpipes from five floors up just to get out of their apartment blocks if they don’t have the right “hall pass.”

The way the virus has popped up with pockets of infection in South Korea, Iran and Italy has been strange. But it suggests we may need to get used to the Covid-19 virus being a way of life, worse than the flu, a dangerous pneumonia, but something people learn to coexist with.

The WHO may be right that most nations are not prepared for that eventuality. The H1N1 swine flu, essentially a new and nastier but normal influenza bug, sent 60.8 million Americans to hospital and killed 12,469 of them, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Its worldwide mortality was a whopping 151,700 to 575,400 people, the vast majority young people in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Honestly, I don’t remember H1N1 all that well. It certainly doesn’t stick in the brain as something that killed half a million people. Here in Hong Kong, SARS and its 298 deaths in this city carries a lot more cultural resonance.

It appears Wuhan pneumonia is going to have far greater impact, both practically and culturally. Just as they should take reasonable precautions over their own health, investors should start assessing public companies for their exposure to the supply-chain effects of Covid-19.

What the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Has to Say About Covid-19

March 12, 2020 By in Business, China, Communist Party, Feature, Humor, Investment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Global stock markets have now shed US$5 trillion in value in response to the Covid-19 coronavirus. Starting to get alarmed yet?!

Fall back to the advice “Don’t Panic.” I was eight when one of my favorite novels, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, came out in 1979. On the cover of that guide, a kind of Lonely Planet for all the planets, are those two reassuring words. We’re told they appear in “large, friendly letters” on a “small, thin, flexible lap computer.”

The hitchhikers guide, a kind of Wikipedia that predated the Internet, has a humorous entry about the planet Golgafrincham. Bear with me, there’s a point here in the end.

[This story originally appeared in Real Money on TheStreet.com. Click here to see the original story.]

Golgafrincham’s poets were fond of making up stories about how the planet was going to end. Maybe it would be as a result of it crashing into the sun, or the moon crashing into it, or 12′ piranha bees. A tale that it was about to be eaten by a mutant star-goat got its residents to organize three arks: Ark A of leaders and scientists; Ark B of useless people like hairdressers, middlemen and telephone sanitizers; and Ark C of the little people who made stuff and got stuff done. Ark B took off first, sent toward a distant insignificant planet, which turned out to be our prehistoric Earth. The wise folk in Arks A and C stayed put after they got rid of the useless people. Tragically, those Golgafrinchans who remained all died out from an infectious disease contracted from an “unexpectedly dirty” telephone.

Is this our dirty telephone? No, we are the middle managers, lawyers, hairdressers, phone sanitizers. The useless ones. These are 12′ piranha bees. We’re saved!

Back to reality. There are so many unknowns surrounding this disease. I’ve been living with it here in Hong Kong since early this year, having survived through SARS in 2003, too. I caution investors who are worried about the health of themselves and their portfolios to keep a calm head.

Strangely, it has been the sudden emergence of clusters of the disease in South Korea, Italy and Iran that has spooked the markets. These clusters have people the world over rushing to buy industrial-strength face masks, stock up the hand sanitizer, panic-buy canned goods.

Here in Hong Kong, people have been stockpiling rice (which mainly comes here from Thailand, not China), and toilet paper, because a tabloid story said all the toilet paper factories in China would start making masks. I stood today behind an elderly lady buying a US$1 bag of bread, who compulsively reached for the huge stack of toilet paper standing by the checkout. She hesitated, didn’t buy in the end. I could a thought bubble, “If it’s run out, then why is there this huge stack?!”

What investors should be worrying about is the fact that China essentially shut down for more than a month. I’m sorry that almost 3,000 people have died. I’m sorry almost 84,000 people are infected. Here in Hong Kong we have 94 cases, which is 0.001% of the population. Last year, 34,157 Americans died of the flu.

So yes, I am avoiding taking public transportation, and I wear a mask when I’m going to very crowded places. I wash my hands, a lot. But I’m not wearing a mask non-stop. I bet a lot of those 94 infected people wore masks, but took them off at group meals, an apparent source of many infections. If I do get the Covid-19 virus, as a healthy Gen Xer, there’s every chance I’ll survive.

Global manufacturing is going to be stumbling to correct for parts failing to arrive for months to come. Eventually that is going to spill over to other sectors: it’s not much good buying Microsoft (MSFT) shares if Lenovo (LNVGY) has stopped making computers.

Markets hate uncertainty, that’s the cliché, and the situation we find ourselves in is full of them. South Korea now counts 2,337 cases, the most outside China, but at least the Korean peninsula shares an extensive border with China. How it cropped up in Iran and Italy in large numbers is a mystery, and that’s what seems to have finally punctured the protective bubble around investors.

You know the numbers. The S&P 500 has entered technical correction, a drop of 10% or more, faster than ever before. In six trading days, it has come off 12% since last Wednesday’s record high. A record high, one month after Wuhan broke out! We’ll see a few more records broken before this is all over, I’d imagine. The Dow’s 1,191-point fall on Thursday was also a new single-day high.

Asian equities are also ailing. This has been a brutal last trading day of the month, with Japan’s Topix down 3.7%, China’s CSI 300 down 3.6%, Korea’s Kospi down 3.3%, a similar fall for Australia’s ASX 200. These are large single-day falls for markets that have generally been selling off since mid-January.

Not since the Lehman Brothers crisis have we seen such selling. Of course, all asset classes are going to have to contend with virus fallout. Are equities more at risk because they had climbed so high?

Analysts at Goldman Sachs (GS) are predicting that members of the S&P 500 will post no earnings growth at all in 2020. That’s a compound effect from the severe decline in China’s economy, resultant disruption in global supply chains for U.S. companies, and eventually a slowdown in the U.S. economy itself, which is 68% driven by consumer spending.

That seems like a sensible path of calculation. The blanket panic selling, however, isn’t wise. Equally, I think it would be incredibly sad if the Tokyo Olympics this summer got called off.

Bargain-hunting investors should not step into the markets now. There is too much uncertainty, and above all too much herd panic. Day traders on the other hand may find these happy hunting times. Shareholders should be holding companies to account for their exposure to Chinese manufacturing disruption, and chaos in supply chains.

The Hitchhikers Guide has little to say about Earth as a whole. “Mostly harmless” is its entire entry. Covid-19 is a nasty pneumonia, certainly not harmless. But investors should for now fear manufacturing sickness above any infected telephone.