Of China, Ponzi scheme and the Panda put

“Wisdom always comes late,” I told her rather philosophically early on Sunday morning. “Are you still hallucinating?” she asked, making a reference to the
late night drinking binge we had indulged in.
“And by the time it comes, the damage has already been done.”
“What comes?”
“Wisdom.”
“Oh. But why are we talking about wisdom early morning?”
“Simply because we refuse to learn from our mistakes.”
“Can you stop beating around the bush and tell me what is on your mind.”
“Yes Ma’m! Basically I had China on my mind.”
“China?”
“Yeah, China. The stock market in Shanghai has gone up by a little over 90% since early November last year. Now what is surprising is that China, over the years, has evolved as an export-driven economy which is highly dependant on exports to the western markets.

With western economies collapsing, Chinese exports have also collapsed. In the month of June, Chinese exports fell by 21.4% in comparison to the same period last year. This has had an impact on the earnings of companies. Profits of large scale industrial companies based out of 22 Chinese provinces fell by 21.2% for the first six months of 2009. But despite this, markets have been rallying. Why is that?”

“How would I know? You asked the question, you answer it!” she snorted.
“Well, the People’s Bank of China, which is the Chinese central bank, has been printing money big time. The Chinese money supply has gone up by around 28.5% from last year. This newly-printed money has found its way into the Chinese economy, with the government-controlled banks lending a record 7.4 trillion yuan ($1.2 trillion) of new loans in the first six months of 2009. Now, to give you a sense of proportion, these new loans are equal to almost one-fourth of the size of China’s economy and a little more than the size of the Indian economy. When such aggressive lending happening, a portion of these loans is being actively used to speculate both in the stock and the property markets, leading to both these markets going up so soon so fast, without any connect with the economic reality of the day,” I explained.

“And what is the economic reality of the day?”
“The economic reality of the day is that things are not good. As I explained, Chinese exports have fallen and so have company earnings, but the stock market is still going up. Or take the case of the Chinese property market. The average price per square metre in China is more or less the same as the price in the US. This, despite the fact that the per capita income in the US is seven times the per capita income in urban China. Property prices in the US have fallen dramatically in the last two years, but that still doesn’t justify similar prices. Basically, the Chinese economy has become a giant Ponzi scheme.”
“A Ponzi scheme? You love that phrase don’t you? To you everything looks like a Ponzi scheme!” she exclaimed.

“Actually, to tell you the truth, I did not figure this one out. Andy Xie, a former Morgan Stanley economist, who is now an independent economist based out of Shanghai, offered this insight around a week back. As I have told you earlier, the Ponzi scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant to the US. He launched an investment scheme in 1919, promising to double investors’ money first in 90 days, and later in 45 days.

Investors got attracted to the huge returns the scheme promised. At its peak, the scheme had 40,000 investors who had invested around $15 million in the scheme. Ponzi had no business model in place to generate these huge returns. All he was doing was using the money brought in by the new investors to pay off the old investors. He ran his scheme till the money coming into the scheme was greater than the money leaving the scheme. One fine day, that stopped, and the scheme went bust.”
“But what has that got to do with the Chinese economy and stock market being a Ponzi scheme?” she asked.

“As I explained, the stock and property market going up has no link with economic reality. They are primarily going up because of all the money that is being lent and is finding its way into these markets. With all this new buying coming in, market prices are going through the roof. Such a market is akin to a Ponzi scheme. As a market starts giving good returns, more and more investors want to enter it. The money brought in by these new investors ensures that the price keeps going up and rewards the older investors, instead of any fundamentals, like in a Ponzi scheme. As Robert Shiller writes in his all-time classic Irrational Exuberance, ‘When prices go up a number of times, investors are rewarded by price movements in these markets, just as they are in Ponzi schemes.’ In addition, when the markets have been on their way up, investors tend to look at the recent past pattern and assume that the market will keep going up. They mistake probability for certainty.”

“Hmm. That makes some sense. But tell me something, what makes Chinese investors so convinced that the markets will keep going up?”
“Oh, that’s because of the Panda put.”
“Panda put?” she asked.
“Yeah Andy Xie, the economist, I talked about earlier, coined this term. It refers to the investor belief that the government won’t allow the markets to fall. The popular belief these days is that the Chinese government cannot allow the stock or the property market to collapse before October 1, 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of People’s Republic of China. So, the bull run is on at least till then. The other major factor influencing this belief is the fact that taxes from property sales account for a major portion of the income earned by local governments in China. So, it is in their interest to sustain high property prices. With this belief in place, retail investors are getting into the market big time, hoping to get rich overnight, as they normally do towards the last stage of a bull run. Even informed investors are gambling on the hope that they will not be in the last wave of buyers.

In modern parlance, this is known as the greater fool theory, wherein investors invest because they feel that some greater fool could be depended on to enter the market after they have, and this would give them handsome returns. This explains to a very large extent why Chinese foreign exchange reserves have gone up by $185.6 billion to $2.13 trillion in the first six months of 2009 — the foreign investors bringing dollars into China to invest in the stock market clearly seem to be hoping that they are not in the last wave of buyers. This is a mistake investors always make, when they become a part of a stock market or a property bubble. “
“Interesting as always… But till when will this last?”
“Oh that’ simple. It will last
till banks keep lending and a portion
of that money keeps getting diverted into the stock and property market for speculation.”
“And till when will that happen?”
“To get an answer to this question, you need to ask Zhou Xiaochuan.”
“And who’s he?”
“The governor of the Chinese central bank.”
“But what is the moral of the story?”
“Wisdom always comes late. Once a government starts a Ponzi scheme, it is very difficult for it to stop it. As
Satyajit Das, the internationally renowned derivative expert said in a recent interview, ‘The only lesson learned is that no Ponzi game can ever be allowed to stop.’” 
 
(The example is hypothetical)