Jim Chanos vs. Ken Fisher on China

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September 16th, 2009 by AdvisorAnalyst

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Jim Chanos, CEO, Kynikos, the mar­kets' biggest short seller, says his skep­ti­cism about the China mir­a­cle is grow­ing, that he is find­ing the China story harder and harder to believe.

Major investors are start­ing to ques­tion whether Bei­jing is telling the truth. "I think the story is get­ting harder and harder to believe," says widely fol­lowed bil­lion­aire investor and hedge fund man­ager Jim Chanos.

"And I'm not the only guy cry­ing about the data com­ing out of China. You are see­ing a lot more arti­cles being writ­ten about it, a lot more skep­ti­cal voices being heard about just how accu­rate some of this data show­ing this Chi­nese mir­a­cle. And the fact of the mat­ter is I don't think it’s very accu­rate at all."

Click play to view:

Chanos' thoughts are very sim­i­lar to those of Hugh Hendry, CIO, Eclec­tica Asset Man­age­ment, whose China field-trip video describes what is going on in some parts of China. Hendry takes us on a tour of Guangzhou, a tier 2 Chi­nese city, home to more than a few empty billion-dollar buildings.

This is in sharp con­trast to the views of Ken Fisher (one of my invest­ing heroes of days gone by — one of the great and most inter­est­ing Forbes colum­nists),  CEO, Fisher Invest­ments,  son of Buf­fett men­tor, Phil Fisher, who is cur­rently over­weight in Emerg­ing Mar­kets posi­tions in China, India, Brazil.

Fisher pre­dicts Chi­nese stocks will lead the bull mar­ket in global equi­ties, as a 4 tril­lion yuan ($586 bil­lion) stim­u­lus pack­age and record lend­ing spurs growth in the world’s third– largest econ­omy. Econ­o­mists antic­i­pate China’s gross domes­tic prod­uct growth will accel­er­ate to 9.5 per­cent next year from 8.3 per­cent in 2009, accord­ing to a Bloomberg sur­vey con­ducted the week ended Aug. 28.

Ken Fisher on Bloomberg TV, September 16, 2009

“It’s per­fectly jus­ti­fied why China has been the best per­form­ing mar­ket since the Lehman col­lapse,” Fisher said. “It has a lot of mon­e­tary and fis­cal stim­u­lus behind it. China is the dri­ver of the V."

Bot­tom line: Chanos believes that the Chi­nese are mis­us­ing their finan­cial resources in a fash­ion sim­i­lar to the for­mer Soviet Union, spend­ing on money los­ing projects for which there is in some cases no capac­ity uti­liza­tion. Fisher believes that China's 4-trillion yuan ($586-billion) stim­u­lus is keep­ing the global econ­omy afloat and the dri­ving force behind the V-shaped recov­ery in stocks (he also believes that this is not a sucker rally)

Sources: CNBC.com | Bloomberg | GreenLightAdvisor.com

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