Thursday, July 16, 2009

China market cap now #2

Yesterday, China's stock market cap ($3.21 trillion) exceeded Japan's ($3.20 trillion) slightly to become the world's second-largest.

The last time this occurred was in January 2008. As recently as early 2006, Japan's market cap was 12x the size of China's.



See earlier posts Sustainability of China economic growth (top figure) and Back to the future (bottom two figures; note these are PPP adjusted).





6 comments:

Dave Bacon said...

I like the graph "Coming Up in the World"...the singularity is coming in 2014!!! (And the Japanese secretly know this will spell the end of civilization and so are quietly planning their own escape.)

Shoibal Chakravarty said...

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.1827

The Chinese Equity Bubble: Ready to Burst

Authors: K. Bastiaensen, P. Cauwels, D. Sornette, R. Woodard, W.-X. Zhou
(Submitted on 10 Jul 2009)

Dog of Justice said...

What do you think of this? I'm disturbed by the apparent ineptness of the government in that incident.

Steve Hsu said...

DOJ: I really don't know much about it. The following is from the Times:

"Accusations against them include paying bribes to Chinese steel executives in exchange for confidential government data that may have given Rio Tinto an edge in iron ore price negotiations with Chinese steel officials. No formal charges have been lodged, and most of the details have been published in China’s state-controlled media. On Wednesday, China Daily reported that Rio Tinto had bribed virtually every one of China’s big steel makers."

These price negotiations have huge, multi-billion dollar implications in the steel industry. I would not be surprised at all if it turns out some Rio Tinto employees had bribed executives at Chinese steel makers to get some key data for the negotiations. What is odd about the case is that since the companies are state owned the information can be treated as a state secret under Chinese law.

The most negative interpretation is that China is so lawless that it is dangerous to do business there, but I think that is an exaggeration. This is clearly a special case.

Ian Smith said...

Is Steve guilty of ethno-chauvanism?

China is more ethnically homogen(e)ous than even the UK, right? That makes Russsia the next largest nation state.

Steve Hsu said...

DOJ: more at the link below.

THE TWILIGHT OF EXPAT EXCEPTIONALISM

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2009/07/twilight-of-expat-exceptionalism.html#entry-more

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