|
|
|
|
|
英文财经 |
|
The China Obsession |
|
星期三, 六月 18, 2008 11:00:58 |
|
|
by
Nicholas A. Vardy |
|
|
|
China bulls have had a rough six months. The Shanghai composite index closed yesterday at a 19-month low of 2,794. That's almost a 55% drop from its Oct. 16 peak of 6,124. And the pace of the relentless collapse seems to be accelerating. Shares in Shanghai fell nine days in a row during the past two weeks, losing 14.4% just last week and dropping 7.7% on a single day. For all of the bad news about the subprime woes and the housing bubble endured by U.S. investors, China's newbie investors have had it much worse. "The China Miracle" has now underperformed the U.S. S&P 500 by well over 10% during the past 12 months.
|
|
|
|
You can't say you weren't warned. Nevertheless, the remarkable endurance of the China obsession continues to astonish me. Last month, I sat on a panel on "global investments" at the Las Vegas Money Show. The panel consisted of four members, and three of them were either China newsletter writers or Chinese fund managers. It was as though China made up 75% of the world outside of the United States, and everything else was just a politically correct afterthought. After everyone had decided that yes, indeed, China was going to dominate the world, I pointed out that Brazil not only was a bigger stock market than China but it had outperformed China by well over 50% in the first five months of 2008. One China guru calmly retorted -- and with no hint of irony -- that Brazil was actually a "China story," as is, it turns out, Apple, Pizza Hut and Starbucks. To a man with a China hammer, everything is a nail.
I also pointed out that had our panel convened in 1908, we'd have been telling investors about the remarkable opportunities in Russian railroad bonds, the fast-growth economies of Austria-Hungary, the dynamism of Argentina, and the new behemoth of the global economy, the United States. And we all would have been remarkably wrong. Twenty years later, in 1928, Russia and Austria-Hungary had been wiped off the map; Argentina was an economic basket case, and even the United States -- the only long-term winner among the group -- was staring into the maws of the Great Depression from which it did not emerge until 1945.
Nor do you have to go back 100 years to find similar parallels. I recently picked up a book published in 1989 on the United States in the first decade of the 21st century. The words "China" and the "Internet" didn't even make it into the index. The World Bank's watershed book on "The Asian Miracle" published in 1993 does not even mention China, focusing instead on Japan and the "Asian Tigers" (remember them?). Fast forward to 2029 -- 20 years from now and the same distance in time that 1989 is to us today. Yet here was our panel of experts convinced of the watertight validity of their own predictions about China 30-40 years into the future.
|
|
|
The China Obsession: History Rhyming?
The most recent parallel for the rise of China is Japan. It is easy to forget how awesome it was in the late 1980s. In the 40 years after the end of World War II, Japan was Asia's fastest-growing economy, becoming the export champion of the world thanks to a combination of cheap labour, low interest rates and a weak currency. As with China today, this kept Japanese goods, priced in yen, cheap for consumers across the world. During the 1980s, the Nikkei 225 index quadrupled in just seven years, while land prices in the big cities tripled. The land under the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was valued more highly than all of Canada.
Entire U.S. industries crumbled under the weight of Japanese competition as workers in Detroit took to battering Japanese cars with sledgehammers. Japanese industrialists went on shopping sprees, collecting trophies of American industry and culture such as Hollywood studios and Rockefeller Center. An entire generation of MBA students studied Japanese so they could compete in Tokyo, the world's new financial center. At the end of 1989, just before the crash, the dollar value of the Japanese stock market was almost twice that of the United States. The Japanese were the new supermen. As Jack Welch, of General Electric put it: "They're relentless. Make them climb a mountain, and they'll look around for a bigger one."
Today, it's China that has taken on Japan's economic mantle of Asian economic giant. Chinese companies are snapping up anything from IBM's personal computer business (Lenovo) to chunks of Wall Street icons such as Morgan Stanley. China's industries may not yet be dominating the world, (Quick: name three Chinese brands... Gotcha!), but it's taken as gospel that they'll be moving from your local Wal-Mart to Silicon Valley very shortly. And as China bulls never tire of pointing out, the normal dynamics of markets don't apply to China. After all, Chinese savers get negative real returns on bank deposits; they have no alternative but to buy stocks.
|
|
|
Bookshelves that once groaned with titles on Japanese management techniques and evocative titles like "The Enigma of Japanese Power" now buckle the weight of this week's newly published tome of the "The China Miracle." That was before the Japanese property and share-price booms based on cheap credit, and Japan's banks (like the Chinese today, the biggest in the world at the time) turned out to be poorly managed and mired in corruption.
The China Obsession: The Future is Not What It Used To Be
And I can hear the protestations of "but China is different." I don't know how the Chinese economic story will unfold. But neither do any of China's new-fangled experts. The reality is that China's economic fate will unfold in ways completely different from the ways today's China experts believe. But with the human brain being what it is, they'll still find a way to convince themselves they were right all along. As unpredictable as China's economic and political future may be, only one thing is certain: as the collapse of the Shanghai market confirms, the iron laws of stock market psychology apply in China as much as they do anywhere else. And if you want to get a glimpse of the future, study the past. Read a good financial history like Edward Chancellor's "Devil Take Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation." You'll learn that every investment generation needs its own version of "China." In the 1980s, it was Japan, and in the 1990s it was the Internet. And if it weren't China today, we'd have to invent something else to replace it. And as astonishing as the "China Miracle" appears today, it will be even more astonishing how distant it will appear in twenty years time.
|
|
文章来源：MoneyShowAsia.cn |
|
|
| | | |
