If you love to blame the media like Societe Generale does, then now is the perfect time to buy Chinese stocks.
Asia Unhedged couldn’t agree more.
Long before it was fashionable, Asia Unhedged spent the better part of this year bemoaning the negative coverage of China’s economy and financial markets in the western press.
Blah, blah, blah, weakening economy, blah, blah, blah, hard landing. Yeah, we get it.
And for that same amount of time Asia Unhedged has been, and continues to be, bullish on China.
So, when Bloomberg reported, “Investor concern over China has reached fever pitch” our interest was piqued.
Since China devalued its currency last month, everyone has been blaming the world’s second-largest economy for everything bad in the global markets.
Société Générale’s global asset allocation team decided to use its newsflow indicator—which tracks references to major themes in the press— to figure out just how high this wall of worry has been built.
“As of Sept. 7, its metric showed that media coverage of a potential hard landing in China had gone parabolic, spiking to a record high,” reported Bloomberg.
The analysts suggested two possibilities for why the chart looks like this.
The first is that China’s growth prospects have actually fallen sharply and economists will soon need to revise their forecasts downward.
Or, the huge amount of negative and fearful news coverage has scared the bejesus out of anyone who reads or watches the TV. The press has created a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to a sharp decline for risk.
SocGen thinks the press is at fault and is taking the contrarian view. It thinks fears about China entering a hard landing are peaking and asset prices are bottoming out. Hence, time to buy.
As Baron Rothschild once said: the time to buy is when there is blood in the streets.
Giving credence to this point of view, Premier Li Keqiang said Thursday that even though China’s economy faces downward pressures, there won’t be a hard landing because the government is fully capable of supporting growth, reported Reuters.
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Dalian in northeastern China, Li said he was confident that the government would achieve its main economic targets this year by expanding domestic demand and enacting policies to boost imports.