Growth Remains Weak Following Party Congress

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 market data-based tracker remained deeply negative, despite a slight improvement over the past two weeks, while the economic data-based tracker was unchanged (Charts 1 and 2).

Growth Appears Weak Ahead of Party Congress

• Our market data-based tracker improved over the past two weeks due to a sizable increase in negative Baltic Dry Index year-on-year growth (Table 1 and Chart 6). However, this can be attributed to base effects; the index is down more than 10% over the past two weeks. The remaining components saw little change since our last update (Charts 3, 4, 5, and 7).
• Our economic data-based tracker is unchanged this week (Table 2). Previously, a weaker PMI helped snap it out of a three-month period of improvement.

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.

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