British hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry is betting China’s “credit bubble” will burst, causing its economy to contract and triggering a global crisis.
Hendry’s Eclectica Asset Management has bought options on 20 companies in international markets that will profit from “a dramatic collapse” of China’s growth that’s been fueled by an unprecedented lending boom, Hendry said in a telephone interview from London on Monday.
Hendry joins hedge fund manager James Chanos and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff in warning of a potential crash in China. The nation’s 13 trillion yuan (US$1.9 trillion) of new lending in the past 16 months, bigger than the economies of South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong combined, is spurring industrial capacity expansion in the same way Japanese credit built inventory during and after World War I, Hendry said.
“There are striking parallels with Japan in the 1920s, when ultimately the whole system collapsed,” said Hendry, 41, whose firm manages US$420 million in assets. “China could precipitate a much greater crisis elsewhere in the world.”
Japan’s export boom collapsed after the war amid excess global capacity, slashing growth and sparking a stock-market crash and bank runs.
Hendry’s flagship Eclectica Fund, a global macro hedge fund with US$180 million in assets, may gain almost US$500 million from its options if China’s economy plunges into a recession, he said. The options cost the fund about 1.5 percent of its net asset value annually, Hendry said.
China’s vulnerability to a crash comes from the “inherent instability” created by a lending binge for infrastructure projects that’s “unprecedented in 400 years of economic history,” Hendry said.
The country is also exposed to exports to a US economy that could shrink from US$14.6 trillion at the end of March to US$10 trillion within 10 years, he said.
Chinese officials allowed lending to surge starting in late 2008 to fight the global financial crisis. New loans rose to a record 9.59 trillion yuan last year and banks advanced another 3.38 trillion yuan in the first four months this year.
“China’s at the mercy of a credit bubble,” Hendry said. “Once you’ve unleashed the genie it’s out there. They are ultimately unstable and it’s that instability that creates their demise.”
The Shanghai Composite index of stocks has plunged 21 percent this year, the worst-performing index in Asia, as investors sold Chinese assets on concern a withdrawal of stimulus spending and a slowdown in construction could choke off growth after an 11.9 percent expansion in the first quarter.
China has cracked down on property market speculation and drained cash from the financial system via three increases this year in the proportion of deposits banks must hold as reserves.
China’s bubble may burst within a year or it may take three years, as Citigroup Inc economists Willem Buiter and Shen Minggao estimate, Hendry said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six