Rosealea Yao reports:

Roughly 80 per cent of China’s urban residents own their homes – an astonishing number for a country that only began to privatise its housing stock in 1998.

Astonishing is right — and frankly, given the absence of any sourcing, I’m not sure I believe it. The high point of the influx from rural to urban China might be behind us, but it isn’t over yet, and all those poor Chinese workers looking to make their lives in the big city are unlikely to jump straight onto the bottom rung of the housing ladder. There might be some shenanigans going on with the definition of “residents” here — are all city inhabitants really included in the denominator?

That said, no visitor to China can fail to be astonished at the sheer quantity of housing stock which is going up in high rises across the country. If Yao is right, then substantially all of that stock is sold rather than rented, which helps to explain the astonishing amount of money in the Chinese construction industry. But it also means hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages in the Chinese banking system, which I doubt were underwritten with particular assiduousness, and which have been written at extremely high price-to-income ratios. China could yet suffer a mortgage crisis of US proportions.

Andrew Baston reports on China’s 7.9% GDP growth in the second quarter:

China’s government only reports year-on-year growth estimates. But when measured in the same terms as other major economies—an annualized quarter-on-quarter comparison—China’s growth in the second quarter could be on the order of 15%, some private economists estimate.

This is proof, I think, that stimulus programs can have spectacular effects, at least in the short term. Although once again Chinese assets are looking pretty bubblicious as a result. Beware the coming crash!

Josh and Tyler have found a piece of ever-so-scientific research which calculates that the Shanghai stock market will crash somewhere between July 17 and July 27. Which is convenient for me, since I’ll be there personally from July 19 through 25; I should have a front-row seat!

If I had to pick a single day for the crash, of course, it would have to be July 22. When the predictions of a Log Periodic Power Law are ratified by a solar eclipse with the longest totality of the century, how could stocks possibly behave otherwise?

Update: Zubin has found a paper about the effect of eclipses on the stock market.

Should the US issue panda bonds, as Guo Shuqing, the chairman of China Construction Bank would like to see? Much better, I think, to start with the World Bank and a few other habitual foreign-currency issuers before suggesting that the US break with all tradition and borrow in any foreign currency.

But yes, if the World Bank can start issuing in yuan, and if it can easily swap its obligations back into dollar Libor, as Guo suggests is possible, then that’s a great idea. A benchmark yuan yield curve would do wonders for increasing the transparency of Chinese capital markets.

(HT: Alea)