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Hey Everyone,
For some strange reason, Wall Street has not participated in the latest Chinese sell-off, which saw the main measure of the nation's stock market, the FTSE China A50 Index, crash approximately 30% peak to trough, according to TradingView data.
Stock markets are usually quite correlated one with another. When stocks are on the rise in one part of the world, they tend to rally elsewhere as well.
In particular, a paper in the Journal of Physics shows that the recent trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic have only strengthened the correlation between the stock markets of the U.S. and China.
The reason for the declines, at least on the surface, seems to be recent authoritarian crackdowns on various sectors of China's economy, starting with the disappearance of Alibaba CEO Jack Ma for three months at the end of 2020.
More recently, Chinese authorities clamped down on Didi, China's version of Uber, since Uber isn't allowed to operate there, and also private education. Yeah, you read that right.
The latest, and by far the most domineering of these regulatory efforts, is their crackdown on video games.
In a recent blog post, state media officials referred to them as what is commonly being translated as "spiritual opium."
The blog post has since been mysteriously removed without explanation, and the link now points to this page. ... |
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Bending backwards
Even though the blog was removed, we can already see that Tencent Holdings Ltd. has been bending over backwards to comply with the spirit of the government's new direction.
Recently, the technology company has stated that it would limit the screen time of minors, allowing them one hour per day on weekdays and two hours on holidays.
The fact that China's crackdowns are extremely targeted might explain why the U.S. markets hardly seem concerned.
Further, China isn't printing $120 billion a month to prop up markets at the moment. In fact, the money supply for renminbi actually looks a lot more normal than those in the U.S.
More to the point, and forgive me for the abrupt transition, while the Federal Reserve has unilateral control over the U.S. money supply, other areas of the nation's government don't have nearly the power they would like.
Case in point, in a livestream today with the Wall Street Journal's Paul Vigna, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler called on Congress to give himself more power and resources to regulate the crypto market.
What I thought was unfortunate was the way Gensler seems to want to stick with former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton's way of doing things.
Rather than try and define new rules of the road, he seems quite content with the old Howey Test, which he praised as bringing much needed fairness and growth to the auto industry when the laws were first written.
In truth, those laws probably were pretty good for business in the 1940s, but it would probably be a lot better for today's businesses if crypto entrepreneurs had a better understanding of what's allowed and what's not.
Unlike Chinese businessmen, Americans usually aren't shy about testing the limits of what's allowed and what's not, especially when the rules are ill-defined. |
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Mati Greenspan Analysis, Advisory, Money Management |
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