Seems it blames it all on the Delta... ?
But, oil production was already being throttled up long before the Delta scare-mongering began ?
Goldman slashes its China growth forecast (which I did way back when we were talking about China "fighting inflation" by reducing iron purchases...my noting that was not about inflation at all... but about growth not materializing)... and Goldman blames that growth slowdown "forecast"... on Delta... even though growth was deep in the tank before the Delta scare-mongering began ?
And, China bonds sell off... because of inflation surging... while gold and silver swoon because no inflation anywhere to be seen ?
The pattern is... they're properly reporting "the fact in the market"... but are consistently lying about the drivers of the things being reported...
Oil is down... because OPEC ramped production up to stop the price rising... and did so because useful to help the economy, necessary to sustain growth to get back up to prior levels of consumption... OPEC did that quite a while back, already ? I noted it at the time... that the headlines blaming it on quota disputes appeared an too obvious canard... done to justify enabling a result they'd not admit openly. Prices stopped rising with the OPEC moves. The price action reversed sharply lower only when it was reported that monitoring of traffic inside China showed it had slowed dramatically... had not come to a stop, but was 30% of normal... causing concern re oil demand in China. That seems it is being borne out now as China goes back into lockdowns for Delta ?
Seems Delta is the excuse du jour... and Bloomberg is doing nothing but going along with that...
Should we expect China to have a different experience of the Delta than anyone else ?
Or, is China just like everyone else... blaming Delta for... acts that are driven by other concerns ?
I don't think we're getting much from Bloomberg... or other media... than "the story" that "they" want told...
China growth is down... for many and overlapping reasons... bad weather... trading partners remain pissed off about the Covid, and China's other increasingly belligerent behaviors... Hong Kong, East China Sea, South China Sea, Taiwan...India, Tibet, etc. all generating noise... but not much more than that in real or immediate impact. China is a bad neighbor, and a bully... not according to China... but according to all of China's neighbors. China's trading partners are all seeking to "diversify" sourcing... finding China is becoming unreliable... which in the short term has only little incremental impact... but, longer term... is going to dramatically change China's future... as a function of China's choices.
China forecasts being cut now... after China's markets have crashed... is a bit obvious... and is clearly not independent of the Crazyman Xi personally torching China's markets repeatedly, and on purpose, this month... causing growing awareness of the incalculable nature of some of the risks of doing business with China... that awareness only amplifying impacts noted in prior comments.
The nature of the choices made... the other issues around it... make it pretty clear we're not hearing the whole story... but, then, whatever it is... no one is going to be telling that story ?
China IS both veering away from prior course in openness... and in many ways is reversing course on policy essentials in ways that will slow the economy... and accelerate the changes already made likely to occur in trading patterns...
And, all of that change is impacting trade, right now, too, in small ways. But, China's trade and the economy did really boom coming out of the first round of Covid... only with that potential being greatly throttled in impact by bottlenecks in shipping... which persist, now... best seen in container rates continuing to soar... and backlogs in ports growing to capacity... that issue likely driving a lot of China's "systemic" inflation.
The rest of the world... is not booming back fast enough to support the boom that China had expected... but the boom we do have... is still too much for the reality in global shipping to handle... ?
Slower growth... that drags out "recovery" a lot longer... is what they were saying BEFORE the Delta scare ?
I still think Delta will be over in a month... after occupying just a single iterative space in the doom porn / to da moon propaganda cycle... with no reason apparent now to expect it changes anything...
Maybe the Delta will "hit China harder"... not because any more real... but only as its the excuse needed ? |
