| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a selective serving of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. "Being bearish about China is one of the most popular trades," Shuli Ren wrote in her column this week. But that notion was tested this week as hedge funds with big bets in the People's Republic saw upwards of 25% returns after President Xi Jinping issued several measures to stimulate the sluggish economy. After a year of ideological strictures, including telling young people to work harder and "eat bitterness," Shuli says, "It's clear that top leaders have finally realized what is really ailing China, and why past measures have not worked." The markets appear to be enthralled that the top echelon of the ruling Communist Party is grappling with the problem seriously. The stimulus arrived just before China's Oct. 1 National Day — and the beginning of a weeklong holiday. Here's how John Authers charted the exhilaration:  While China's slowdown isn't a crisis along the lines of the 2008 global meltdown, as Daniel Moss notes, the world still depends on Chinese industrial and consumer demand to keep the rest of the planet's economy humming. So a lot is riding on Xi's latest fixes: Will they actually do the trick? Says Daniel: "For Beijing's stardom to last, it needs to not only deliver what's been flagged: forceful monetary easing, fiscal expansion, new measures to help homebuyers, capital injections into lenders, and the creation of a market-stabilization fund. Officials also now need to offer some meaty goals that justify the euphoria." Both Daniel and Shuli are in the wait-and-see camp, if only because the government hasn't quite defined what success will look like. But Beijing's policies, coupled with the entrepreneurial instincts of its business people and good old-fashioned capitalism, have led to startling developments. David Fickling looked at how Chinese businessmen nimbly exploited a trade war and market gyrations to dominate the global solar panel industry, leaving the US — which invented the technology — very far behind. Meanwhile, says Catherine Thorbecke, while the West believes that China "has driven its technology industry off a cliff," what's happened is that Xi has sharpened the sector's "goal to focus on national clout and security in a way that could shift the global balance of power." Those, of course, have very little to do with the so-far intractable real estate crisis in the Middle Kingdom — or relieve youth unemployment. Consumer demand is still low and, if Golden Week movie box office is any indication, not quite back to even last year's levels. One good week doesn't undo a slew of dismal developments. But a little exuberance shouldn't be scorned. Just keep it rational. For a while, the biggest Asian movie star in the world was Godzilla. I am a fan of the pioneering Japanese kaiju but it is strange that a gargantuan lizard was the stand-in for 60% of the world's population for decades. The recent proliferation of Asians in Hollywood — not just on screen but behind the camera — has helped rectify that. Indeed, the two presences are correlated, as Karishma Vaswani points out.  Godzilla is still a megastar, but there are not only big-name Asian stars in Hollywood now (Simu Liu, Priyanka Chopra, Daniel Dae Kim) — there are storytellers, too. Without them, we wouldn't have had Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Life of Pi; Crazy Rich Asians; Slumdog Millionaire; Everything Everywhere All at Once and so on. The success of the writers and directors of those films has resulted in a more substantial Asian contribution to the rest of Hollywood's output. Ang Lee directed Brokeback Mountain (and won an Oscar for it, repeating with Life of Pi). John Chu has gone from Crazy Rich Asians to helming the much-anticipated movie adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked (featuring Michelle Yeoh as well as Bowen Yang). Still, the roles and jobs are few and far between, considering how many Asians are out there — and have stories to tell. Hollywood can make a lot of money if it puts those aspirations on screens. As Karishma says, "You can't be what you can't see." Oh, there was another big Asian star I worshipped while growing up: Bruce Lee, who died in 1973. His story will be told in a new movie soon — directed by Ang Lee. "Northvolt AB's financial difficulties have laid bare a fundamental impediment to Europe's hopes of building a locally owned battery industry to power the energy transition: Making batteries at scale is capital intensive and hard, ramping up production can take years, and hiccups are inevitable and potentially financially ruinous. Experienced firms like Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. and BYD Co. of China, South Korean giants LG Energy Solution Ltd., SK On Co. and Samsung SDI Co., and Japan's Panasonic Holdings Corp., have a multi-year head start and account for the vast majority of the world's battery production. Anyone assuming Europe can catch up quickly by throwing money and manpower at the situation is either hubristic or naïve — or both." — Chris Bryant in "Making EV Batteries Is for Masochists. Northvolt Proves It."  "Incoming Nike Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elliott Hill could learn a lot from his counterpart at Adidas AG Bjorn Gulden. In formulating his strategic blueprint, Hill should follow Gulden in making Nike nimbler and introducing some winning products, like Adidas' Samba. But he should take a leaf out of Gulden's book in another way too: He should not miss the opportunity to reset sales and earnings expectations lower for the coming fiscal years, making them more realistic ..." — Andrea Felsted in "Nike Desperately Needs Its Own Samba." Where are all the tourists in Cancun? — Juan Pablo Spinetto Britons have to pay more for university. — Matthew Brooker The pound is not on a bull run. — Marcus Ashworth The oil price that matters is $50 a barrel, not $100. — Javier Blas Germany needs to think outside its banks … er, borders. — Paul J. Davies The unnatural financial life of Springer Nature. — Chris Hughes On my daily walk home, I often see an old double-decker bus repurposed to ferry tourists on a journey through haunted London. More often than not, it's parked next to St. Bartholomew's Hospital and the guide — sometimes in ghoulish white face paint — regales the passengers with stories of the murdered nurse whose spirit lurks in a lift or the little boy crying in the corridors. There are lots of ghosts purportedly in the area if only because St. Barts has been around for more than 900 years. It also abuts what was once an execution ground, where people were burned at the stake. The Scottish national hero William Wallace was drawn and quartered here. I have yet to see any specters, though there are lots of St. Andrew's crosses to keep Wallace's spirit alive. From murderous monarchs to Jack the Ripper, London has such a bloody history that it isn't a surprise there are ghost stories everywhere. There will be more in the air as Halloween approaches. In a slightly related matter, a couple of readers emailed me that they'd never seen the bones (non-human) that I wrote about last week, the ones that have washed up on the shores of the Thames at Queenhithe, a medieval dock that may have been in use as early as Roman times. So here's a photo where, among the driftwood and rocks, you can make out the detritus of carnivorous feasting cast into the water by people now long gone.  The bones of Queenhithe. Photograph by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg A new book says the British elite are putting on commoner airs, but it's just an act. They're still the old dragons. Food for thought?  "Drop by any time. And bring the kids. I absolutely love children." Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send privileged information and feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment