Americans, since the end of the Cold War, have been reassured by their politicians that they continue to live in grave danger when, in fact, they do not (and probably never did in the first place?). As John Glasser and Christopner A. Preble conclude in a piece for the (often described as ‘libertarian’) Cato Institute […]

Why would education have a bearing on honesty? The answer, in economic terms, is that the opportunity cost of being found out to be a shabby operator is higher for those with more of it. This observation is just one of several fascinating asides in the paper highlighted this week. Jiapin Deng from the Sun […]

The study highlighted today from the Journal of Gerontology by Dr. Paola Zaninotto (et. al.) from the University College London claims to be the first to look at how socioeconomic factors relate to longevity and the quality of later life in both the U.K and the U.S. It seems the researchers set off to prove […]

Does the world have more or less trees today than 40*-years ago? Congratulations if you answered more. It’s a fact, as the paper today from Xiao-Peng Song (et. al.) from the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, clearly demonstrates. Over the 35-year period studied total tree cover, globally, rose by 7.1% (*I’m […]

Within half a generation a green field has turned into the second most important city in the world in terms of new-technology development. Kirsten Lundberg from Columbia University, the author of the paper highlighted today, asks the question could governments elsewhere in the world foster such an outcome? Rather than answering directly the author takes […]

In fairness to the author of the essay highlighted today the work is advertised as a ‘Think piece’ which gives them some latitude in terms of making a taught argument (they don’t!). Despite the long ramble there’s some serious thinking here and some very serious issues raised. Let me try and condense Larry Catá Backer […]

[How to read this table (below).] What you see here are major economies when their respective PPP per capita GDPs were the same as China’s is today. So, for example, U.S. data is taken from 1940, the United Kingdom from 1954, Argentina from 1995 and so on. The question the researchers who wrote the Working […]

Since China was granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations status by the U.S. in 2000, conditional on its accession to the WTO the following year, study after study has been produced to show how badly that’s worked out for U.S. workers in manufacturing industries. Few studies have looked though at the effect on China’s labor force; […]

There’s an abundance of work on U.S. companies that shows, on balance, less-experienced (hereafter ‘Rookie’) directors have a positive influence on a firm’s performance. In China though firms are different in that in nearly all cases there’s a majority owner and here the ‘.. main governance issue [in China] is controlling shareholder wealth expropriation from […]

‘Pants-On-Fire!’ China bashers have been quiet of late. Dire predictions about the property market have failed to materialize and breathless commentary about rising debt levels has stopped because, well, debt levels (in relative terms) have sort of stopped rising. A few doughty muckrakers though have been trying to make a case that household debt is […]

Holy smoke! Every investor, institutional or PA-punter should print out the extract below from the paper highlighted today. The former should pin it up in a prominent location in their office; the latter might want to put it on their refrigerator door. What you’re looking at (at the top) is how well stocks do after […]

The IMF were in Hong Kong recently and a summary of their conclusions and recommendations was released last Wednesday, December 4th. You can read that in full here HKSAR IMF Health Check December 2019; but if you don’t have time here’s a very brief summary. Spend! Spend!! Spend!!! The team note a recent fiscal stimulus […]

Financial professionals know the idea that an individual can ‘day-trade’ for a living is a dangerous conceit. However, literature produced by brokerages and other service providers who offer to teach investors this ‘skill’ suggests that rubes are continuously persuaded this is possible. In a study of the world’s third largest equity futures contract on the […]

What makes the International Finance Discussion Paper highlighted today from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System so useful is not just its scholarly conclusions, but also its commonsense observation that in reality their work may provide only conservative estimates of the magnitude of a global shock resulting from a China hard landing. […]

What’s wrong with the following statement? The Chinese save too much; and this leads to a large current account surplus that’s destabilizing for both them and the world. It may have been correct ten or even five years ago; but IT’S NOT NOW. Let’s first have a look at that over-saving notion. The chart here […]

Why have Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) stayed so big and, in many cases, gotten bigger in recent years? Work from Jim Huangnan Shen from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (et. al.) clarifies some notions that were, until this work, mostly anecdotal. From around 1998 the Chinese government initiated a […]

You’re a government that wants to encourage output (and what government doesn’t?). There are two way you can do this; stimulate investment or innovation. In 2004 China decided it wanted to encourage the latter and chose six metal-bashing industries in the notoriously metal-bashing-centric provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning as experiments for a pilot reform […]