International Investing and China in the NBER Digest

I came across a couple of interesting items in the July issue of the National Bureau of Economic Research's NBER Digest.

The first item that caught my eye was The Declining Gain from International Portfolio Diversification (by Les Picker). That article describes a NBER Working Paper by Karen Lewis, a financial economist at Wharton, where she examines the puzzle of why investors tend to disproportionately weight their investment portfolios to domestic securities and assets. This tendency is a 'puzzle' because this tendencymeans that investors forego the possible gains -- including lower correlated risks, higher returns from riskier foreign investments, etc. -- from international diversification.

Prof. Lewis finds that (a) international equity markets have become more correlated over the years (although she didn't find them to be as highly correlated as others have suspected them to be), and (b) foreign stocks that are listed on U.S. exchanges have become highly correlated with the U.S. market(s) over time. Thus, the potential gains from international portfolio diversification have been declining, and there seems to be relatively little to be gained in the way of diversification from investing in domestically listed foreign stocks.

The second item of interest in the NBER Digest is The Return to Capital in China (also by Les Picker). This article discusses research by professors Bai, Hsieh, and Qian, on what affects (if any) China's high investment rate (over 40% of GDP) has on returns to capital. The researchers found that (adjusted for various factors) China has relatively high returns to capital. It should be noted that this is an interesting finding because high investment rates can often mean lower returns to capital.

One of the plausible reasons why China's return to capital seems to be higher is -- despite misallocation of capital in many cases -- that China's economy has been moving rapidly toward more capital-intensive industries and techniques and away from purely labor-intensive industries of the past.

Greenspan chimes in on Chinese stockmarkets

I've written a couple of posts lately about the possibilities of a stockmarket bubble in China (More signs of a Chinese stockmarket bubble, 5/13/07, and Makings of a Chinese Stockmarket Bubble?, 4/29/07) . According to the New York Times (5/25/07), former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has chimed in as well. According to the Time article:

Mr. Greenspan, now 81, struggled to contain the tech stock boom, issuing his famous “irrational exuberance” warning in December 1996 only to watch the American market keep rising and finally collapse in early 2000. He tried his hand at forecasting Chinese stocks on Wednesday, telling an audience in Madrid by satellite that the Chinese market was “clearly unsustainable” and could undergo a “dramatic contraction.”

After setting records on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the A shares, those traded in yuan, fell 0.47 percent in Shanghai and 0.6 percent in Shenzhen on Thursday as investors responded to the warning.

But the warning was not news to Mr. Zhou and other Chinese officials. The central bank, securities regulators and prominent business executives have all been cautioning investors that buying stocks is not a guaranteed path to riches — all with less apparent effect than Mr. Greenspan.

To reiterate my earlier warnings, developments in China can (and has) effects on an increasingly inter-linked, globalized financial markets.

More signs of a Chinese stockmarket bubble

According to the Financial Times [in Bourses in China eclipse all of Asia (May 9, 2007)]: "The value of shares traded on China’s stock markets on Wednesday was greater than the rest of Asia combined – including Japan – helping the benchmark index to breach the 4,000 mark for the first time. Analysts said this was almost certainly the first time that turnover at the Chinese bourses had exceeded that of the rest of Asia." (Although, it should be noted, that the Chinese stockmarkets in Shanghai and Shenzhen are still substantially smaller than the markets in Japan, the UK, and the US, in terms of market capitalisation.)

This is more evidence for some of the comments I made in previous posts on China's financial sector ... the latest post being Makings of a Chinese Stockmarket Bubble? (April 29, 2007). A financial bubble (that bursts ... as they invariably do) in China could have devastating consequences for markets (and economies) of other countries (including the US, the UK, and Europe). It's definitely worth keeping an eye on developments in China.

Makings of a Chinese Stockmarket Bubble?

China is in the midst of a stockmarket frenzy. According to an article in The Economist magazine (April 26, 2007), new accounts at stock brokers are being opened at a rate of more than 200,000 a day (e.g., more than 310,000 on April 24th of this year). Many of these punters are relatively new to the market and are often either unsophisticated or relatively low-income (including, students and old-age pensioners).

What is fueling this madness for stocks? Despite a couple of scares earlier this year (February 27, and April 19), phenomenal returns (for now). E.g., the Shanghai Stock Exchange's composite index rose by about 130% in 2006 (and is still rising). (See the chart below.)


Having seen some newspieces from China Central Television's channel 4 news on the latest stockmarket craze, I can see how much the stockmarket has permeated daily life in China.

It's worth noting that another factor, besides hyperbolic returns, is driving this 'investing' frenzy -- consumer technology. By "consumer technology" I don't mean China's equivalent of tech stocks (although I'm sure they are enjoying a boom). Instead, it is the growing availability of communcation devices like cell phones, instant messaging, and broadband Internet connections that have reinforced and further enabled this stockmarket 'madness of crowds.'

So is this a bubble? It certainly has all of the earmarks of a stockmarket bubble that will eventually burst. The recent past has demonstrated that Chinese stockmarkets (in Shanghai and Shenzhen) are vulnerable to market volatility as well as to macroeconomic shocks and policy changes by the Chinese Communist Party.

One of those Chinese would-be investors, when describing China's stockmarkets, quoted by The Economist summed it up best: "It's like a casino set up by the Communist Party." If the CCP isn't careful, they will find themselves in quandry (which they may already be in). A rising stockmarket keeps the public (especially the growing middle class) mollified and gives the CCP more credibility. On the other hand, a bubble that burst could cause widespread anger toward the CCP. As Western capitalists can attest to, it is rather difficult (if not impossible) to reconcile those two agendas.

China & Grey Tuesday

As I've stated in the past, I try to avoid making this blog too event-driven. I'd rather let things happen in the markets, see if they are worth commenting on, and, if it is worth commenting on, try to analyze events after the dust has settled and clearer heads prevail.

Having said that, I think it is worth pointing out one aspect of last week's sharp and sudden drop in the financial markets. Dubbed 'Grey Tuesday' by some, the events of February 27, 2007 -- where the Dow Jones dropped by more than 400 points in a matter of minutes (a rate of decline that had been hitherto unprecedented) -- garnered a lot of attention.

A lot of the 'analysis' that was given on television seemed to focus on a lot of things (the terrorist attack in Afghanistan while Dick Cheney was visiting, etc.) that seem to me to be largely irrelevant. The one bit of news that probably did have a significant impact was the sharp drop in Chinese share prices that immediately preceded the drops in Western stock markets.

China had been experiencing eye-popping rise in stock market valuations. This brought the Chinese markets (in Shanghai and Shenzhen) to the attention of wary Chinese policymakers who were concerned about over-heating markets and rampant irrational speculation. These concerns moved Chinese regulators to talk down their stockmarkets as early as January of this year. Apparently all of these attempts to cool Chinese markets came to a head at the end of February ... much to the chagrin of traders and investors around the world.

'Grey Tuesday' -- or whatever one wants to call it -- should serve as a wake-up call to the investing community. This is yet another example of how much global markets are inter-connected to one another. Claims of adequate diversification via a simplistic approach to 'global' investing is -- as the most recent Buttonwood column (in The Economist) points out -- should be met with skepticism. Correlations and covariance between financial markets in different geographic regions are not static ... they are dynamic and market values tend to move together in the most inopportune ways (in downward directions almost simultaneously).

The rapid drop in market prices is also another example of the often 'wild' nature of randomness. Events in financial markets is a lot more jumpy than what most finance textbooks would suggest.