Add China to the list of those markets (oil being another example) where rhetoric is more important for setting market direction than data.
Yesterday the Chinese government released generally disappointing economic numbers. Industrial output, for example, rose by 6.5% in April from April 2016. Economists were expecting growth of 7%. Industrial output grew by 7.6% year over year in March. Investment in fixed assets climbed by 8.9% in the first four months of 2017 versus the 9.1% growth expected by economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
But China will spend $78 billion as part its new Silk road global trade initiative, President Xi Jinping pledged at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. The $78 billion, or 540 billion yuan, pledge includes 100 billion yuan for China’s Silk Road Fund, 380 billion yuan in new lending for other countries that participate in the plan, and 60 billion yuan for countries and organizations that join the program in coming years.
That spending pledge, plus the assumption that the People’s Bank will start injecting cash into the financial system soon in order to keep growth from dropping too much lower, sent Chinese markets modestly higher overnight with the Shanghai Composite Index climbing 0.74% and the ChiNext small company index gaining 2.04%.
