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Japan’s Trading Houses Get Buffett-Backed Trading Boost

April 13, 2023 By in Asia, Business, Investment, Japan, Stock market, Warren Buffett Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Warren Buffett sees something in Japan’s sogo shosha conglomerates, and says he’ll throw out the idea of co-investment deals while visiting his holdings in Japan.

Warren Buffett’s desire to sample more Japanese-equity flavor continues to boost the Tokyo market. The Topix closed 0.8% higher on Wednesday, matching Tuesday’s 0.8% bump, after Buffett indicated he intends to increase his holdings in Japan, and specifically its storied sogo shosha, or trading houses.

This story first appeared on TheStreet.com’s subscription service Real Money. Click here to see the original.

Buffett via his Berkshire Hathaway holding company owns a decent chunk of each of the five biggest Japanese sogo shosha: Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. Berkshire first revealed holdings of at least 5% in an August 2020 filing, indicating it had spent US$6 billion on the stakes, then increased its holdings to 6.6% of all five in November 2022, and now announces it holds 7.4% of each.

“We’re very proud of that,” Buffett says in an interview with the Nikkei business daily. He will be meeting with those five trading houses this week “to really have a discussion around their businesses and emphasize our support.”

True to form for value-driven Buffett, the trading houses are very “real” businesses that are sprawling and complex but serve very essential purposes. With their roots in commodities and goods trading, they have expanded to become investment holding companies, too, much like Berkshire Hathaway in fact.

Buffet went on to indicate that Berkshire would be open to co-op investment with or alongside the trading houses. “We would love if any of the five would come to us ever and say, ‘We’re thinking of doing something very big’ or ‘We’re about to buy something and we would like a partner,’ or whatever,” Buffett said.

Although the trading houses are currently the extent of Berkshire’s holdings on the Tokyo market, Buffett says additional investments in Japan are “always a matter of consideration.” The five trading houses are his current focus but “there are always a few I’m thinking about.” This is his first trip to Japan since August 2011.

The trading houses are a kind of conglomerate specific to Japan, dating to the mid-1800s and Japan’s period of reopening to the world as the reign of the isolationist Tokugawa shogunate ended. The earliest trading houses were zaibatsu family-run conglomerates, with the trading house operating in-house to supply goods, transport and finance to the group’s various businesses. After World War II, another cluster of trading companies formed in the Kansai region to deal in commodities such as textiles or steel.

The trading houses played a major role in the overseas expansion of “Japan Inc.” in the 1980s, helping source goods and provide financing for companies that weren’t all that experienced internationally because of Japan’s 200+ years of closure to the outside world. As Japanese companies became more comfortable with their own overseas operations, the trading houses boosted their business in insurance, transportation, property development and project management — very much lines of business that Buffett likes.

The global scope of the conglomerates and the similarities with his own holding company are not lost on Buffett. “We feel that these five companies are a cross-section of not only Japan but of the world,” he says. “They really are so much similar to Berkshire. They own a lot of different things.”

However, the trading houses are perpetually lowballed in valuation, trading under 10x forward earnings, some would say for a reason. They are so diversified that they are hard to categorize, and critics contend their very nature is an oddity of Japanese history that no longer serves a purpose. Growth has been hard to come by for these giants, while their core operations are open to disruption to trade such as we’ve seen in the wake of the pandemic and due to the war in Ukraine.

Marubeni and Sumitomo in particular took write-downs to their operations in Russia during the tax year that ran through March. Profits when they come out are expected to drop for all five trading houses due to Russian disruption and pandemic effects.

On the plus side for a value investor like Buffett, the trading houses have been engaging in share buybacks, increasing the value of existing shares. And they pay very solid dividends indeed, as high as 5.01% for Sumitomo.

The share prices of the trading houses have all blossomed since Buffett bought into them. Part of that is the effect of other investors following Buffett’s lead. In the past year, both Marubeni and Mitsui are up by more than 30%, while Mitsubishi has advanced 15.6%.

They’ve all basked in Buffett light in the past two days. Itochu is up 4.8%, Marubeni is up 7.7%, Mitsubishi is up 4.4%, Mitsui is up 5.1% and Sumitomo is up 6.0%.

Buffett also discussed the sell-down of Berkshire’s stake in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., the world’s largest chip foundry. Berkshire bought more than US$4 billion in TSMC stock between July and September 2022. But it ditched 85% of that holding in quick order, an unusual move for Buffett, who typically likes to retain core holdings for years if not decades. By the end of 2022, however, Berkshire held only US$617 million in TSMC stock.

Buffett said geopolitical tensions are a “consideration” in the divestment. He believes that TSMC is well-managed but that Berkshire has better places to deploy its capital.

One reason investors have been particularly excited about what Buffett has to say in Japan is that Berkshire Hathaway is marketing another offering of yen-denominated bonds. It’s expected to price those this week.

Berkshire did the same thing three years ago before buying the stakes in the trading houses. One underwriter told the Nikkei that these new bonds will be used to roll over existing debt. But savvy Buffett doesn’t like to tip his hand before he plays it. Watch for any indication that the money is going toward other companies in Japan, which would be sure to get a stock-price boost from the Buffett seal of approval.

China Sets ‘Highly Challenging Target’ for Economy

March 7, 2022 By in China, Communist Party, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Investment, Politics, Real Estate, Stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Premier Li Keqiang stresses stability and the importance of 100 million ‘market entities,’ even as Beijing keeps up its regulatory assault on the private sector.

China will target growth of 5.5% in 2022, at the high end of expectations but still far off the double-digit pace we’d grown used to, as the Middle Kingdom grew to become the world’s second-largest economy.

Premier Li Keqiang delivered a forecast of GDP growth of “around 5.5%” while giving his annual work report to the National People’s Congress, the Chinese Communist Party’s yearly agenda-setting meeting for the country’s economy.

“This is a highly challenging target,” Société Générale economists Wei Yao and Michelle Lam say in a research note. It is an acceleration from the two-year compound growth 5.1% rate established in 2021, and there are plenty of headwinds blowing against the Chinese economy.

This story first appeared on Real Money, the premium site of TheStreet.com. Click here to visit the original story.

Top of the list: China still has a “zero-Covid” policy that requires a disruptive snap local lockdown wherever cases break out. It’s hardly a realistic approach in the face of the hyperinfectious Omicron variant. A leading Chinese virus expert has hinted at a change in approach, as I mentioned on Friday, with the potential for China to move toward “Chinese-style coexistence with the virus,” whatever that means.

It’s vague language that allows the Chinese Communist Party to carve out any old “live with Covid” strategy that it likes, explaining away any aberrations by saying they’re necessary in China. It would be a face-saving step designed to discourage too many people from asking why such harsh lockdowns were ever necessary.

But the CCP has so far struck a fine balance by avoiding an overload of the Chinese healthcare system, which is not strong outside the major cities, while permitting much of daily life to return to normal. This has been achieved by barring nearly all overseas travel. The number of Chinese passports issued in the first half of last year was just 2% of the number issued in the first half of 2019.

China set a growth target of “over 6%” for 2021, and official growth came in at 8.1%. Given the wild swings in the economy produced by the pandemic, China also cites the 5.1% average compound annual growth rate over 2020 and 2021, combined.

Li, speaking to around 3,000 delegates in the Great Hall of the People on Saturday, laid out the lowest growth target since 1991. He acknowledges that China “could face more difficulties and challenges this year,” and pledges that China will issue C¥2.5 trillion (US$396 billion) in tax refunds in 2022, in support of the private sector.

President Xi Jinping directed a series of regulatory crackdowns over the course of the last 18 months, in particular targeting Big Tech but also highlighting the “disorderly expansion of capital.” Quite what the “orderly expansion of capital” looks like is unclear; the criticism, part of the overarching “Xi Jinping Thought” that’s now codified in the Chinese Communist Party charter, gives license for the party to curb the power of the private sector, and take down a notch both Chinese “unicorn” companies and its billionaire entrepreneurs.

Meetings like the NPC owe a lot to the Marxist-Leninist roots of the Chinese Communist Party, and the “five-year plan” style of a command economy. Li praised the work of “market entities, over 100 million in number,” for having responded “with fortitude and resilience” to the shocks of the last year. “Employment is pivotal to people’s well-being,” he continued, suggesting the party is not at this time in a position to push its difficult overhaul of its inefficient, bloated state-owned enterprises. “Our efforts to keep market entities afloat are aimed at maintaining stable employment and meeting basic living needs.”

China is resisting direct stimulus from the government to support the economy as it slows, and Li said the government will target a fiscal deficit of 2.8% of GDP this year, down from 3.2% in 2021. But economists believe Beijing will continue to roll out dovish policies this year, and is even warming to the property sector, where prices have gone into reverse. It kept its inflation target at “around 3%,” and the forecast for land sales stays flat, an optimistic call given that many parcels of land are going unbought due to the financial deleveraging forced on developers.

The SocGen team calculate that the measures announced at this meeting equate to fiscal stimulus of around 3% of GDP. That’s one percentage point larger than the economists expected. Li frequently stressed “stability,” and he repeated the Communist Party’s clarion call that “housing is for living, not for speculation,” suggesting it will pull support once again if home prices start to rise.

It is not yet therefore time to consider buying the beaten-down shares of Chinese developers. Li warned that “land prices, home prices and general housing market’s expectations should be stabilized,” with affordable housing and an expansion of the rental-housing stock high on his list of priorities. Nomura says the overall impression, coupled with no mention of imposing a property tax, is that policy has turned “slightly friendly” toward the beleaguered property sector.

The NPC, coming on the heels of the closing ceremony for the Beijing Winter Olympics on February 24, marks the second major marker for the Chinese government this year. It is building toward the 20th Party Congress, likely in November, the latest installment of a key leadership overhaul that’s held once every five years. At this Party Congress, Xi will be seeking an unprecedented third term as president, having pushed through a change in the constitution that will allow him to run again. He will surely be unopposed but must still muster the support of the party. Xi wants to be able to declare victory over the coronavirus and point to solid steering of the economy.

Li did not mention the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the geopolitical distress haunts this year’s proceedings. China is staying largely silent, not wishing to criticize its ally, Russia, but is therefore giving tacit support of the war. It is attempting to cast itself in the role of peacemaker, but it may find it hard to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table at a time he appears recalcitrant. Putin is insisting on the “demilitarization” of Ukraine, but China – whose officials stress over and over again the importance of national boundaries and “sovereignty” – has done nothing to criticize the clear violation of Ukraine’s borders.

Chinese shares are dropping today in synch with other Asian markets. The CSI 300 of the largest companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen ended down 3.2%. As is usual when there’s selling in this downturn, Hong Kong has fared worse than most, with the Hang Seng lurching 3.7% lower.

It’s another heavy day of selling on Asian markets on Monday, with the Topix in Japan closing down 2.8%, and all major indexes lower. The day began badly after oil shot up, with Brent crude up 8.9% at the time of writing, having risen briefly above US$130 per barrel. That hurts most Asian nations, which bar Malaysia all import large amounts of oil. The United States is leading the charge in figuring out how to restrict and sanction oil shipments out of Russia, the world’s third-largest oil exporter.

The Sensex in India is also down 2.7% at the time of writing. China and India bookend the United States as the three largest importers of oil in the world.

Indonesia is also a major oil extractor, although the former OPEC member is now a net importer of oil. Still, the production levels out of Southeast Asia are insulating those markets slightly on Monday. The Jakarta Composite Index were down 0.8%, Singapore stocks were 1.0% lower an hour before the close, and Malaysian equities were off 2.3%.

Hong Kong Stocks Stagger Into 2022 as World’s Worst Performer

January 4, 2022 By in Asia, China, Communist Party, Hong Kong, Investment, Stock market Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Hong Kong was the worst performing major stock market not only in Asia but the entire world in 2021. The hamstrung Hang Seng index hobbled into year end. It’s astonishing to see a major financial hub’s market down almost 15% in what was supposed to be a year of recovery, when U.S. markets and others have been touching record highs.

This story first appeared on TheStreet.com and its subscription service, Real Money. Click here for the original story.

The Hong Kong stock market’s increasing influence from Chinese tech explains part of the underperformance. Then there’s real estate, a mainstay of the local market but beaten down by the sharp falls in mainland Chinese developers. And equally, the depressing disappearance of the city’s civic freedoms are to blame.

The Hang Seng index plunged 14.1% last year. It is far out of step with the double-digit gains in Australia (up 13.0%), Japan’s Topix index (up 10.4%), Indonesia (up 10.1%), and the majorly outperforming markets in Taiwan (up 23.7%) and India (up 21.7%).

There are smaller gains, true, in Singapore (up 9.8%), South Korea (up 3.6%), with the Philippines essentially flat (0.2% lower for 2021), and losses in New Zealand (down 0.4%) and Malaysia (down 3.7%).

Chinese markets also ended in the red. It is internationally focused Chinese companies that are experiencing the rot. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index is made up exclusively of Chinese companies that are listed in Hong Kong but that do not trade inside mainland China. It was down a startling 23.8% in 2021, a sharp contrast with home-listed Chinese companies.

It’s a reflection of the rising pressure from Beijing for Chinese companies to “return back home” in terms of their listing. Didi Global (DIDI) is the unwitting poster child for that category of company. The ride-hailing market leader in China was pressured into delisting from the New York Stock Exchange under duress from Beijing. It was barred from signing new customers after its June 30 IPO, leaving its shares now 66.2% below the listing price. It said at the start of this month that it will abandon the NYSE and attempt to list in Hong Kong, as I explained at the time.

Most of the tech companies listed in Hong Kong have U.S. listings that are sure to be equally unpopular with the Chinese Communist Party. Until they abandon them, there’s the suspicion their shares can be hurt by drastic action. U.S. authorities are also acting to bar foreign companies if they don’t file accounts that can be inspected by U.S. regulators – a move that Chinese law suggests would be illegal. It’ll take a regulatory huddle across the Pacific to sort that one out.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s market remains in limbo. It should rebound once any penalties that Beijing is levying on Big Tech are laid down, and if the U.S. listing issue can be resolved. If and when that happens, there could be a swing in the order of 20% to 30% – the Hong Kong market’s underperformance this year – but this is a regulatory issue, not one driven by fundamentals. A policy change could be announced overnight in Beijing, or Washington. Or not.

Then there are the ongoing social problems in Hong Kong. Britain says 88,000 Hong Kongers have taken up its offer of a residence visa through September, after the program began in January. A record number of Hong Kongers have emigrated, to the United States, Australia, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand and other popular destinations.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss just delivered the six-month report that Britain compiles twice a year to cover the state of play in Hong Kong. It is damning in its condemnation of the oppression of citizens by the Hong Kong puppet government and the Chinese Communist Party above it.

In particular, a much-hated National Security Law went into effect on June 30, 2020, imposed directly from Beijing rather than having any input from Hong Kong’s people or their representatives. But the local authorities – the police, the courts, the administration of Chief Executive Carrie Lam, and the shadowy National Security Office – have abused it to persecute any and all of Beijing’s perceived enemies.

The media is under attack, sometimes literally. Unions, civic groups and student unions have been forced to disband. There’s an informant’s hotline, East Germany-style, for you to rat on your neighbors if you think they’re not patriotic enough. You can feed through information, photos, audio clips and video files if you want to report a violation of the National Security Law, which is so vague that popular protest slogans can land you in jail.

Britain notes that any contact by its politicians with anyone in Hong Kong is often construed by Beijing and the Hong Kong government as “foreign collusion.” This can involve the simplest diplomatic contact, and in fact Beijing’s critics are dubbed to be “colluding” with, well, anyone that they contact overseas. The Hong Kong government and China frequently refer to shady “foreign forces,” which sounds like an army, or the CIA, but can equally mean the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. They never identify who these “foreign forces” are.

Hong Kong is preparing to hold joke elections on December 19. They’re a sham designed to pretend there’s any semblance of democracy in the city. But no pro-democracy candidates are running – they’re not allowed to, since only pre-screened “patriots” who support the mainland government and the Chinese Communist Party can take part.

The vast majority of opposition politicians have either gone into exile, or are in jail. The city’s most-popular newspaper, the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily, was forced to shut down when its accounts were frozen and its top executives arrested. On Monday, the newspaper’s founder, Jimmy Lai, was sentenced to 13 months in prison for attending a vigil honoring those who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Hong Kong used to mark the June 4 anniversary with a memorial service attended by thousands of people. It has been banned the last two years, under the pretense that it would violate Covid-19 protocols.

Lai, who was sentenced alongside seven other pro-democracy leaders, is already in prison. He was convicted of inciting people to participate in a rally for a cause that is, at least on paper, legal to celebrate. But the police didn’t approve the vigil – for political reasons they pretend are all about public health. A hand-picked judge doing Beijing’s bidding, Amanda Woodcock, insists there’s a need for “deterrent” sentences due to the disruption to public order and the way those attending “belittled” a public-health threat. She insists those convicted thought the Tiananmen Square massacre commemoration was “more important than protecting the community.”

They thought nothing of the sort. Lai wrote a mitigation letter that you can find here. Any punishment will see him share the “burden and the glory” of those who shed their blood to proclaim truth, justice and goodness. “May the power of love of the meek prevail over the power of destruction of the strong,” he says.

These social issues bubble away, a poisonous undercurrent beneath society. It is the issues over U.S. listings that have depressed the city’s stock market this year, not to mention the forced deleveraging of the Chinese property industry. Hong Kongers will remain depressed as long as they’re oppressed by the dictatorship sitting atop them.

Australia Reportedly Faces Secret Trade Ban by China

November 10, 2020 By in Asia, Australia, Business, China, Communist Party, Coronavirus, Covid-19, Politics, Stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This story first appeared on TheStreet.com.

https://realmoney.thestreet.com/politics/australia-reportedly-faces-secret-trade-ban-by-china-15481731

Is China punishing Australia by imposing a secret ban on a series of Aussie imports? That appears to be the case, with November 6 reportedly set as the day for the ban to begin.

Beijing has ordered a halt to the import of a wide range of Australia products, with at least seven product categories temporarily banned, according to a Bloomberg report citing “people familiar with the situation.”

The hit list would stop inbound shipments into China of coal, barley, copper ore and copper concentrate, sugar, timber, wine and lobster, the report states. The sources asked to remain anonymous because the information is sensitive.

Any temporary ban on commodities such as coal and copper would go much further than previous one-product restrictions, normally on high-profile consumer goods. China is Australia’s top trading partner, accounting for A$136 billion in imports into China in 2018, according to figures from the Australian government, with A$78 billion in Chinese goods heading the other way. That total two-way volume is up 35.8% since 2016.

Ore shipments explain why Australia punches above its weight as China’s sixth-largest source of imports, on par with Germany. Australia’s total trade ranks it as China’s 14th largest partner, matching the size of the Aussie economy.

China often changes visa restrictions for its citizens without any public notice. It often tries out policy changes in the securities industry by letting industry insiders experiment without any official announcement of a change in the rules to see how things go. And it occasionally restricts permissions for the import of certain specific goods in retaliation of perceived slights.

But China normally publicizes its punishments on trade. So it is unusual that Aussie exporters are in the dark on any trade ban about to come down.

The effects are already being felt.

Lobsters languish

Tons of live Australian lobsters have been left stranded on the tarmac of a Chinese airport, The Sydney Morning Herald reports, with customs clearance taking too long for the shellfish to reach restaurants before they are spoiled.

Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham says he knows about the reports of “customs clearance issues” on premium shellfish shipments into China. Paperwork suddenly becomes hard to come by if China wants to punish companies from a particular nation or multinational. So-called “health and reliance checks” have been holding up shipments into Shanghai, with China the destination for 94% of Australian rock lobster exports.

The trade minister said “discriminatory screening practices” imply a breach of World Trade Organization rules and a breach of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

I doubt Beijing’s bigwigs are going to let that bother them. World Trade Organization (WTO) and United Nations rules and protocols are very useful when China wants something, less so when they don’t suit Beijing.

Virus vitriol

China and Australia are at odds diplomatically after Australia requested an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. Australia has also sent its warships to participate in “freedom of navigation” trips through waters that China claims in the South China Sea.

China pushes dodgy evidence of centuries-old fishing trips by Chinese vessels as justification for a land grab over the oil-and-gas-rich waters right up to the shores of the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam. All those nations are fighting China with legal challenges over their territorial rights.

The trade restrictions began in May, when China introduced heavy tariffs on Australian barley and suspended imports of beef from some Australian slaughterhouses.

China has since launched an investigation into whether Australia’s wine producers are dumping bottles at cut-rate prices on the Chinese market. The Australian cotton industry says Chinese spinning mills have been told to stop buying Australian cotton.

Pressure tactic

The China International Import Expo is taking place this week in Shanghai, at which President Xi Jinping sung the praises of international trade. Officially, China’s commerce ministry has denied that Australian goods are under a ban.

Trade analyst Jeffrey Wilson told The Guardian this is a classic example of “gray zone” diplomacy, where China is attempting to scare Australian companies over access to a key market, using trade to exert political pressure.

“The ambiguity is by design,” he says. “It’s not a trade war, it’s psychological war.”

Shares in Treasury Wines Estates fell 8% in Thursday trading in Sydney after the maker of Penfolds wines said China’s drinks industry is requesting Beijing to impose unprecedented retrospective tariffs on Australian wine already sold in China. That’s part of an anti-dumping investigation launched in August by China’s commerce ministry.

Spying spat, too

Besides their public diplomatic spats, China and Australia are also engaged in a clandestine fight over spying and undue political influence over Aussie politics.

Sunny Duong, a Chinese-Australian community organizer, on Thursday became the first person charged over foreign interference in Australian politics under new Australian national security laws. Duong, who heads the Oceania Federation of Chinese Organisations from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, has been a prominent donor to the pet projects of various Australian politicians.

There are no details as yet as to what Duong, who has been very public with his appearances alongside Australian politicians, is supposed to have done wrong. But the Australian Federal Police raided several properties in Melbourne on Oct. 16 in relation to the investigation.

Australia’s spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), has worked with the FBI-equivalent federal police on a counter foreign interference (CFI) taskforce in a year-long investigation.

“The CFI taskforce has taken preventative action to disrupt this individual at an early stage,” Australian Federal Police deputy commissioner Ian McCartney said, according to The Guardian. “Foreign interference is contrary to Australia’s national interest, it goes to the heart of our democracy. It is corrupting and deceptive, and goes beyond routine diplomatic influence practiced by governments.”

ASIO began warning in 2017 of Chinese influence attempts to control Australian politics through donations and sympathetic politicians.

In a blockbuster 2019 allegation, ASIO said it was investigating evidence that Beijing attempted to plant its operative as an elected official into the national Australian government. ASIO went public after news media broke the story. A Melbourne luxury car dealer, Bo “Nick” Zhao, reportedly told ASIO he was offered a “seven-figure sum” to run for government by a Chinese spy ring. Zhao was found dead in March 2019 from unexplained causes in a Melbourne hotel room.

As is typical, China has countered that Australia has been spying on China on a mass scale, instigating defections, spying on students and feeding false stories to the news media. A foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said in response to a report that Australia has tried to bug the Chinese embassy in Canberra that Australia is playing the “part of the victim, peddling rumors and stoking confrontation by staging a farce of the thief crying ‘stop thief.'”

Chinese exiles say they have faced intimidation from pro-Beijing squads while sheltering in Australia. It is a similar situation to what other Chinese exiles say has been happening in the United States. It appears these shadowy squads are sent to silence Beijing’s critics or force them to return to face Chinese courts through threats against their families in China or abroad.

Australia was the first country to ban the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies from involvement in the country’s 5G mobile phone network. It cited national security concerns.

However, China is particularly angry over Australia’s demand for an investigation into the roots of Covid-19. It has worked very hard behind the scenes to force concessions from the World Health Organization as to how it will investigate the virus, with the WHO leaving many key decisions to China, and hobbled in its attempts to send its own scientists to the virus epicenter in Wuhan.

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.”

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%.

Fukushima Operator TEPCO Approved to Re-Start World’s Largest Nuclear Plant

October 6, 2017 By in Business Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Fukushima Operator TEPCO Approved to Re-Start World’s Largest Nuclear Plant

The word “nuclear” has a lot more power in Japan than it does elsewhere.

Tokyo Electric Power, or TEPCO as it is better known, has just won approval to re-start two reactors at the world’s largest nuclear power plant. Its shares got a jolt of 3% at that announcement.

Nuclear-linked stocks will be worth watching as the company pushes on with that attempt. TEPCO is, after all, the company that responded so badly to the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant in 2011.

The only country to have been hit by an atom bomb nevertheless embraced the technology behind nuclear power. Around one-fifth of all electricity is intended to be produced that way.

Then came the disaster at Fukushima. The March 2011 earthquake unleashed a tidal wave that ultimately killed 15,894 people, causing ¥21.5 trillion ($191 billion) in damage. Only the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine was worse.

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