Brief China: Today’s NBS Data On China House Prices Across 70 Cities – Lower Priced Cities Keep Catching Up and more

In this briefing:

1. Today’s NBS Data On China House Prices Across 70 Cities – Lower Priced Cities Keep Catching Up
2. US Dollar Demand – Fading Appetite

1. Today’s NBS Data On China House Prices Across 70 Cities – Lower Priced Cities Keep Catching Up

Today’s data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on new home prices for 70 major cities in January shows on average a marginally accelerating year-on-year price growth and a slower month-on-month increase.  This continues to contrast with the year-on-year deceleration in SouFun-CREIS 100 Cities price index.

2. US Dollar Demand – Fading Appetite

In 2011 the world experienced the best year of demand expansion – in US dollar terms – in any year since the financial crisis, until 2018 that is. But you would hardly realise that that was the case by reading the newswires, the stories there since early 2018 have been about ‘synchronised slowdown’ and, in particular, the demand downdraft from China. The reality is that developed countries (the US, EU, UK and Japan) plus developing Asia (China, India and the Asean-4) produced US$4.1trn of ‘new’ GDP demand in 2011 and in 2018 was on course to produce US$4.1trn in new dollar demand.