China Growth Tracker: Economic Index Restarts Ascent

We published a note on how to track Chinese growth in real time using financial and commodity market prices. In these weekly reports, we update the indicators to help us track growth.

Summary

• Our new high-frequency China reopening index appears to have restarted its ascent.
• Our market data-based China growth tracker is less optimistic on the reopening despite our economic data-based China growth tracker returning positive for the first time since July 2021 (Charts 2 and 3).

Positive Economic Developments

Our high-frequency China reopening index had stagnated through March, and helped to correctly identify that the composite PMI wasn’t due another monstrous climb higher as it had in January and February (Chart 1). It appears to have restarted its ascent.

Markets are far more hesitant on the development of the reopening; our market-based China growth tracker has regressed over the past week (Table 1). This is despite our economic-based China growth tracker returning positive for the first time since July 2021 on the pack of another set of strong PMIs (Table 2).

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

Photo Credit: depositphotos.com

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