Chinese stock market crash; has the bubble finally burst?

[Martinus]

Such law would completely decimate Polish stock market journalists who routinely seem to talk entirely out of their ass.

[viper37]

China does seem to be grabbing the low end of the (dying) PC market with the Acer brand it overpaid IBM for.  Or was that Visio?

Lenovo.

And it's not dying.  It has had negative growth in the past, and it should oscillate toward stagnation.  Most gamers prefer to pay a premium for antiquated hardware and casual users prefer a tablet.

[Barrister]

China does seem to be grabbing the low end of the (dying) PC market with the Acer brand it overpaid IBM for.  Or was that Visio?

Lenovo.

And it's not dying.  It has had negative growth in the past, and it should oscillate toward stagnation.  Most gamers prefer to pay a premium for antiquated hardware and casual users prefer a tablet.

Antiquated hardware?  What are you referring to?

[The Brain]

China does seem to be grabbing the low end of the (dying) PC market with the Acer brand it overpaid IBM for.  Or was that Visio?

Lenovo.

And it's not dying.  It has had negative growth in the past, and it should oscillate toward stagnation.  Most gamers prefer to pay a premium for antiquated hardware and casual users prefer a tablet.

Antiquated hardware?  What are you referring to?

Yeah! Where?

[MadImmortalMan]

I paid extra on my last PC for a windows downgrade. 

But anyway. All hail the China crash. It made my highest earning year ever. I wouldn't have put so much in, but my wife happened to be snooping around when I was doing my research and convinced me to take a full short position. She was all about putting everything we had into that but it's just too damn risky.

If I had done so, we'd be retiring right now.

[Phillip V]

I paid extra on my last PC for a windows downgrade. 

But anyway. All hail the China crash. It made my highest earning year ever. I wouldn't have put so much in, but my wife happened to be snooping around when I was doing my research and convinced me to take a full short position. She was all about putting everything we had into that but it's just too damn risky.

If I had done so, we'd be retiring right now.

Where do I find someone like your wife.

[viper37]

China does seem to be grabbing the low end of the (dying) PC market with the Acer brand it overpaid IBM for.  Or was that Visio?

Lenovo.

And it's not dying.  It has had negative growth in the past, and it should oscillate toward stagnation.  Most gamers prefer to pay a premium for antiquated hardware and casual users prefer a tablet.

Antiquated hardware?  What are you referring to?

consoles like the Xbox and the Playstation.  The gaming potential of PCs are limited because many developpers want to cater to these markets by offering a unique experience across the board.  Dragon Age Inquisition comes to mind.  Many portions of the game had to be disabled because the older consoles could not cope with it.  And we will see the same thing with DA4 when it comes out as the current gen console will be antiquated compared to a modern PC.

[Alcibiades]

I paid extra on my last PC for a windows downgrade. 

But anyway. All hail the China crash. It made my highest earning year ever. I wouldn't have put so much in, but my wife happened to be snooping around when I was doing my research and convinced me to take a full short position. She was all about putting everything we had into that but it's just too damn risky.

If I had done so, we'd be retiring right now.

How about we don't pester you to run our accounts....but you share more of your thoughts and ideas on stocks?   

[jimmy olsen]

The collapse accelerates

http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-august-manufacturing-pmi-slips-1441070881

BEIJING—China got another poor picture of its economic health on Tuesday, as an official gauge of manufacturing activity in August slumped to a three-year low while the usually strong services sector showed new weakness.

Meanwhile, private gauges of both manufacturing and services activity also showed a similar pattern of less-than-stellar activity despite government efforts to bolster the economy.

Analysts said, however, that some of the weakness could be temporary, as the latest slip in manufacturing may have been aggravated by temporary factory closures aimed at controlling pollution around the nation's capital ahead of celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two.

Still, there was no question that the nation's main economic engines weren't running at full speed.

"There is insufficient growth momentum in the country's manufacturing sector," said  Zhao Qinghe, an economist with the National Bureau of Statistics, in a statement accompanying the release of the official economic data.

The data spurred selling in Asia, with Shanghai's major stock index down about 5% after the data were released before clawing back and trading at about 2% lower. Share indexes in Tokyo and Hong Kong also were down.

China's official manufacturing purchasing managers index fell to 49.7 in August from 50 a month ago, falling short of market forecasts of 49.8. A reading above 50 indicates an expansion in manufacturing activity compared with the previous month, while a reading below points to a contraction.

The government's nonmanufacturing PMI, also released on Tuesday, fell to 53.4 from 53.9 in July, showing expansion but at a slower pace.

China has set an economic growth target of about 7% for this year, and policy makers have vowed to ensure the expansion reaches that level. The economy has so far maintained that pace, but a full-year expansion at 7% would still be the worst performance in more than two decades.

Chinese Premier  Li Keqiang said on Saturday that the economy was showing signs of improvement after a series of measures to boost growth, though he said the government still needed to do more to ensure that growth didn't come up short.

So far China has slashed interest rates five times since November and made repeated moves to let banks lend more of their deposits. It has also offered tax breaks for businesses and accelerated approvals for infrastructure projects.

But weak demand at home and abroad have confounded Beijing's efforts. Exports slumped 8.3% in July and were down nearly 1% for the first seven months of the year compared with last year. Imports slid 8.1% in July and have dropped for nine consecutive months, partly due to a fall in demand at home.

Last month, China's central bank devalued the yuan by 2%, and it has let the currency slip further since. It hopes the weaker currency will give the nation's exports a bit of a boost by making Chinese goods a little bit cheaper in foreign markets.

The government said that weather as well as factory shutdowns in and around Beijing were to blame for some of the manufacturing weakness during the month. It said that efforts to limit air pollution in the cities of Beijing and Tianjin and neighboring Hebei province in north China had slowed production, and that the PMI in this region was lower than the national level. The government plans a huge military parade on Thursday, which has been interpreted as an effort to demonstrate its military and political prowess.

Analysts said that the weakness in the nonmanufacturing measure probably reflected disruptions to the financial sector that followed a steep slide in stock prices in June and July.

Meanwhile, the final Caixin Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' index came in at a more than a six-year low of 47.3 in August from 47.8 in July, according to publisher Caixin Media Co. and research firm Markit, which compile that index. The reading was better than the preliminary level of 47.1 issued late last month but remained at a 77-month low.

The Caixin China services purchasing managers' index showing sluggishness outside the factory sector with the slowest increase in 13 months. It fell to 51.5 in August, from 53.8 in July.

[Syt]

consoles like the Xbox and the Playstation.  The gaming potential of PCs are limited because many developpers want to cater to these markets by offering a unique experience across the board.  Dragon Age Inquisition comes to mind.  Many portions of the game had to be disabled because the older consoles could not cope with it.  And we will see the same thing with DA4 when it comes out as the current gen console will be antiquated compared to a modern PC.

Agreed. When I bought my XBox 360 a year or so after its launch it had notably better hardware than my PC which was a big incentive for me to buy it at the time (and a few games that at the time weren't scheduled to come out on PC). I was happy with my 360 for several years (including the Guitar Hero phase, obviously).

I already regret buying the PS4. Games like GTA5 or Alien Isolation look better on my 3 year old computer (though to be fair I replaced the graphics card last year, going from 660 to 770), and most games I'm interested in come out for PC, anyways, with the exception of a handful sports games and Sony exclusives.

I see why developers still like to publish for consoles - they're pretty easy to use and maintain for the average couch gamer, and piracy is less of a concern.

[Monoriu]

There are clear signs that China's economy is slowing down, but I won't call it a collapse.  The business cycle is hardly unique in China.  Everybody's economies go through ups and downs.  China's economy has grown in the past twenty years.  So what if it slows down for a while. 

[Admiral Yi]

There are clear signs that China's economy is slowing down, but I won't call it a collapse.  The business cycle is hardly unique in China.  Everybody's economies go through ups and downs.  China's economy has grown in the past twenty years.  So what if it slows down for a while.

The conventional wisdom is that the Communist Party has to deliver a certain level of growth or the social contract breaks down and they lose the mandate of heaven.  My personal hunch is that's around 3-4% a growth a year.

[Richard Hakluyt]

There are clear signs that China's economy is slowing down, but I won't call it a collapse.  The business cycle is hardly unique in China.  Everybody's economies go through ups and downs.  China's economy has grown in the past twenty years.  So what if it slows down for a while.

I think that the growth just gets more difficult as China moves up the GDP per capita table. Building additional steelworks, coal mines, roads etc is a fairly straightforward process, moving on to a rich services economy less so. Growth rates slowed in places like Japan and Korea as they developed too.

[Monoriu]

There are clear signs that China's economy is slowing down, but I won't call it a collapse.  The business cycle is hardly unique in China.  Everybody's economies go through ups and downs.  China's economy has grown in the past twenty years.  So what if it slows down for a while.

The conventional wisdom is that the Communist Party has to deliver a certain level of growth or the social contract breaks down and they lose the mandate of heaven.  My personal hunch is that's around 3-4% a growth a year.

The problem is that these kinds of statistics aren't very reliable.  If they say they'll deliver 7% growth, I am sure the department of statistics or whatever it is called will certainly report at least 6.9% growth no matter what. 

[Admiral Yi]

People get paid in money, not statistics.