One Eye on China: Are the Wheels Wobbling?

Here is a CNBC video clip showing Jing Ulrich talking about business conditions in China. Her perspective is one of promoting China's investment opportunities to foreign investors for Morgan Stanley. Never-the-less, she provides some interesting observations. For example, she talks about the tier one cities like Shanghai and Beijing compared with the tier two, three and four cities that would all be names I have not heard of. These cities will need development that represent needs of the population and potential asset growth in the China economic story. She points to the coming expansion of a high speed rail system as an integral piece of the rapidly developing emerging economy, creating employment now and part of the transportation infrastructure for further growth in the future.

One Eye on China: It's Economic Foundation is Being Built

The US Government finds itself entangled in the global financial crisis that it started and has, as financiers of it's spending, two of the largest Eastern governments, Japan and China. Perhaps the single largest owner of US Treasury bonds in the world is the Bank of Japan. The Chinese government investment in U.S. Treasury bonds officially shrank to $755.4 billion in December, down $34.2 billion from the previous month, and that technically allowed Japan to jump China as the owner of the world's largest holding of Treasury securities.In addition, China has foreign exchange reserves of $2.4 trillion US dollars which has accumulated after years of trade deficits. It also has almost $9 trillion of US dollars held on deposit in China's banks. I guess that makes it clear why we must be aware of China and it's $US strategy.