A Bull in China
As I type this, I’m sitting remarkably close to the epicenter of the Internet stock boom that once thrilled and then chilled the Nasdaq. But even after that experience (and the explosive upswings we’ve seen since then), those of us confined to the American markets have no frame of reference for what’s happening in China. Consider that “of seventeen hundred stocks on the Shenzhen Exchange, only four have fallen this year, and more than a hundred have seen their shares rise more than five hundred percent.” And all that’s happening while China is suffering through difficult economic times. The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki on Eastern Exchanges.
+ “A hotel group rebranded itself as a high-speed rail company, a fireworks maker as a peer-to-peer lender and a ceramics specialist as a clean-energy group. Their reinventions as high-tech companies appear to have less to do with the gradual rebalancing of China’s economy than with the mania sweeping its stockmarket.” There’s even a pet food company trading at 221 times earnings. (Maybe the Pets dot com sock puppet should come out of retirement.) The Economist on the dangers of China’s manic bull market.