Hello my friends, today is September 21st and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week we had the exciting 50 basis point cut from the Fed and the SMP500 making you all time highs. We talked a lot about things happening in the US, so today let's talk about three interesting things that are happening outside of the US. First, let's talk a little bit about the great rebalancing that's happening in China where the government is guiding the country away from things like real estate and finance towards industries like high-tech manufacturing. Secondly, let's talk a little bit about what's going on in Japan where the Bank of Japan met last week, didn't hike rates, but is still telling everyone that eventually they will. And lastly, let's talk a little bit about EM Central Banks who have traditionally followed the Fed but now seems to be dancing to their own tune.
Alright, starting with China. So just looking at the Chinese economy based on market indicators, you can see that things don't seem to be doing very well. Looking at the Chinese stock market index, you can see that even as the SMP500 is making new all time highs, the stock index in China just doesn't look very good. And of course, the bond market there is sending concerning signals as it continues to make new lows. Now as we all know, over the past few decades, real estate has been a really big part of the Chinese economy.
Property developers have been building tremendous amounts of new buildings and bridges and roads and that's been boosting GDP and households also participated in the boom by buying a lot of condos and other real estate. And as prices went up, everything was doing well. Property developers continue to build new buildings and households continue to feel wealthier as their real estate holdings appreciated. But over the past couple years, things basically took a 180 and began to move in reverse.
And as property prices declined, property developers stopped building, had trouble paying down their loans and households began to feel poor and began to retrench, trying to save money as their properties that they purchased began to move underwater. And that all and all this is having a pretty negative impact on the Chinese economy. And you can see through aggregate data, whereas the Chinese export sector continues to build and export domestically retail sales just haven't recovered since COVID and in part, that is because China did have much more stringent COVID lockdowns than other parts of the world.
Now, typically speaking, when your economy is in this situation, the fiscal authorities and the monetary authorities would do a lot of stimulus. And that's certainly what we saw in 2020 in the US. But President Xi wants to take a different path. He doesn't want to take a whole bunch of, you know, he doesn't want to open the spigot to do a whole bunch of fiscal spending. He thinks that's not the right way to go. Instead, he's taking the advantage of the situation to try to rebalance the Chinese economy away from things that he perceives to be less productive, like real estate, like finance, and towards high-tech manufacturing, specifically things like EVs, lithium batteries, and so forth.
And if you are the president of China, you have a lot more power than other than other presidents because basically the Chinese government controls everything. And so you can see his fingerprints on a lot of the big moves that are happening right now. Now, just this past week, there is a long article in Bloomberg talking about how the big banks in China are cutting salaries in a big way, sometimes by as much as 40%, and just not hiring a lot of people. And it's making a lot of people in China very sad.
But from the government's perspective, that is basically moving towards rebalancing, discouraging people going to places like finance, and of course addressing income inequality, which they also perceive to be a very, very dangerous, politically unstable situation. And so you can see from the aggregate data, less and less interest in things like real estate, finance, and more and more towards things like high-tech energy and manufacturing. And this is also something that is filtering down to the school level where when a high-school student is applied for college, it's becoming more and more competitive to go into fields like energy and less and less competitive to go into fields like finance, as more people apply to the former and less people apply to the latter. So again, the government's fingerprints are here trying to direct everyone away from what they perceive to be, you know, unproductive industries and towards things that they perceive to be better industries.
And to be clear, China has had a lot of success in this high-tech manufacturing. Now, BYD, which is an electric vehicle manufacturer, is the largest in the world, and by all accounts, they produce vehicles that are both cheap and do a very good job. And that's kind of surprising. A few years ago, I don't think anyone would have heard of BYD, but today they really are the largest EV manufacturer in the world. And trying to export out, facing some political obstacles, of course they can't export to the US and are facing higher tariffs in the EU, but it is very much the success of foreign Chinese manufacturing.
Now in addition to that, there's also another great rebalancing that's happening that I think is a bit more concerning. That is rebalancing away from the private sector towards the public sector. Now, looking at aggregate data, you can see that over the past few years, there have been fewer and fewer private companies in China and more and more public companies. So the public sector is growing in influence. And you can see that also by things you hear in the news, whereas the Chinese government is very openly cracking down on a lot more private enterprises. The few years ago, again, high profile person, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, suddenly disappeared for some time, and then only to reappear later and just kind of never say anything again to the press.
So there seems to be an atmosphere in China where private industry feels discouraged, and so there's just not as much initiative there. And you can see that in the overall VC startup sector in China as well, that used to be very vibrant as private industry was booming. A lot of money pouring in to fund all these startups. Now recently that's basically all dried up. So now, President Xi not just wants to change the direction of industry in China. He also wants it to be more state directed. Now, historically, that's not been a good choice simply because private enterprises have over time proven to be more efficient and more innovative. As someone who worked in the public and private sector, I can tell you it's really clear that if you work in a public sector backed place, well, you can't fail. Nothing you do matters.
So there's never any drive to innovate and to save money. Whereas if you work in the private sector, if you don't do well, you fail, you go bankrupt, you don't want that to happen. And so there's more of an incentive to work hard and do good work. So it seems like this direction, I think, is good to have more balance away from real estate. That's ultimately a Ponzi scheme, but longer term, you also need a vibrant private sector. So let's see how that turns out in the coming years.
The second thing that I want to talk about is what's happening in Japan. Now, as we all know, even though the Fed and many other central banks in the West are cutting rates, Japan actually is thinking about hiking rates. And that narrowing interest rate differential between the US and Japan has been one of the drivers of the yen appreciation. Again, the yen touched, let's say, a bit above 160 USD JPY. And since then has appreciated significantly of this past week, the Bank of Japan met and the market perceived it to be a dovish surprise. And we saw the Japanese yen depreciate notably. Now, the Bank of Japan is still telling everyone that it wants the hike rates, but is kind of postponing that cycle.
Now, initially, before we had that big carry trade blow up in August, the Bank of Japan was forecasted by the markets to hike in October. Now the Bank of Japan clearly is not going to hike in October, and is signaling maybe that they'll hike later on December, sometime next year, or something like that. Now the Bank of the Governor's Wayda seems to be willing to wait a bit more because he sees the yen appreciating. Now with the yen far away from 160, he feels like he has a lot more breathing room. Now part of the reason he wanted to hike was because the yen was depreciating so much that it was both affecting import prices and it was having a significant negative impact on consumer sentiment.
So with the yen kind of more stable, at least not consistently depreciating, he feels more comfortable. But in order to understand why he continues to want to hike, it's useful to look at some of the data. Now, here's some interesting charts from the BOG board member Tamaya about why the bank wants to hike. Now first off, look at inflation in Japan. Now before the pandemic, it was obviously really low and sometimes negative. But since the pandemic, if you look at, no, there are a number of inflation metrics here. If you look at CPI less fresh food, it's still above 2% and maybe trending higher. Other indications seem to be trending lower, but overall, inflation is much higher post pandemic than pre pandemic and still seems to be above the 2% target. So if inflation is above your target, obviously you want hike rates.
Now comes a difficult question though. How much should you hike? Now this is ultimately a question of what is the neutral rate. However, the neutral rate is the rate where the bank is either slowing the economy down or boosting economic growth. It's basically a benchmark to know just how stimulative you are or how restrictive you are. Now Japan has been basically on zero just for a really long time, so they don't really know just what the neutral rate is. So they rely on economic models.
Now to be clear, economic models like this are almost always nonsense. However, we have to look at this because policy makers in the Bank of Japan at least look at this with some reference. Now according to a number of neutral rate models, now the neutral rate could be anywhere between negative 1.5% real to a bit above zero real. So there's a wide range of possibilities of where the neutral rate is. But from the Bank of Japan's perspective, it kind of doesn't really matter where the neutral rate is because currently real rates in Japan are really negative and below even the lowest estimate of the neutral rate.
That means by any economic models measure, the Bank of Japan continues to have monetary policy to be very easy even as inflation is above 2%. So from that perspective, well, they got to do something because you can't be easy when that inflation is above 2%, right? That doesn't make any sense. So they continue to forecast hikes in the coming months. And so we could still see this interest rate differential within the US and Japan narrow.
Now one other thing that I'd like to discuss is how this board member is making a pretty nuanced view of interest rates in his discussion. Now in the US, we don't really get that as much. It seems like interest rates up economic activity down, inflation down. But the SPOJ board member is making some interesting distinctions.
First off, he notes that there are distributional impacts of interest rates, whereas people who save money would have higher income, whereas people who don't save most money and have to borrow who have to pay higher rates. And in Japan, looking at the data, it's very clear that older people have more savings. Younger people tend to have to borrow money. And so when you hike interest rates, you have a big distributional impact that it benefits older generations and it hurts younger generations. A couple other really interesting observations he makes is that higher interest rates can actually maybe improve productivity.
Because if you are a big and ginormous corporation, you have access to the capital markets and when interest rates are low, you can just kind of borrow and keep borrowing and roll over debt forever. And even if you do a terrible job, you will never go bankrupt. You basically become a zombie, just kind of not quite dead. You can die, can't go bankrupt because you can always roll over your debt through low interest rates.
But because you are just not very good at your industry, you can't really grow either. This policy maker notes that when you have higher interest rates, these companies, they kind of have to work harder. Otherwise, they can't meet their interest rate payments. So in a sense, it's putting pressure on them to innovate, to be more efficient, to become more productive and improving productivity is ultimately essential to having growth. So higher interest rates have some benefit there as well. And the last observation, which is very, very relevant to Japan that he makes and only been passing is that higher interest rates have an impact on the fiscal situation.
Now when you're Japan, you have the highest debt to GDP in the entire world. So if you hike interest rates a little bit, your interest rate expense, your interest expense is going to go up a lot. We talk about how in the US interest expense is over a trillion, it's a lot, it's not sustainable. Well, in Japan, debt is even higher. So if they hike too much, that interest rate expense can really, really explode. And that could be a big political issue. All right.
The last thing that I want to talk about is this really interesting phenomenon where emerging market central banks have historically followed the Fed closely, but this time they're doing their own thing. Now as we all know, the dollar is the world's reserve currency. And so if you are a emerging market or smaller country, you really have to pay close attention to what the Fed does. Otherwise your currency is going to get whacked. And that's a big problem because if you are a small country, well, you know, you're importing a lot of stuff that's denominated in dollars, say oil or other commodities. And very likely you're exporting a lot of stuff that's denominated in dollars as well. So if you have big fluctuations in your exchange rate, well, maybe your import prices get too big and that impacts some sectors.
Or maybe if your currency becomes too expensive, maybe that impacts the competitiveness of export industries. So usually what you want to do is you want to adjust your interest rates along with the Fed such that your currency is not too volatile. You have a floating rate currency, but you want to make sure that it doesn't move too much against the dollar, which is of course the world's reserve currency. And of course, if you are in emerging market, oftentimes your capital markets are pretty fragile.
If you have too big of an interest rate differential, you could have a lot of people move money out of your country into the US and that could of course be very destabilizing. Basically big sell-offs in your domestic capital markets. So if you look at this chart from Bloomberg, you'll notice that pre-pandemic, Fed hikes, emerging market hikes, Fed cuts, emerging market cuts as well. You got to keep that interest rate differential within some bounds. Otherwise, you know, it's going to be destabilizing for their currency and for their financial markets.
But since the pandemic though, there's been a change. Now we noticed during the pandemic, Fed kept interest rates really, really low and then began to hike. One interesting thing we saw during the pandemic was that the emerging market central banks hiked before the Fed. And so they seem to be hiking in anticipation of inflation, which is something that they are much more familiar with than the US.
Now more recently, as the Fed is cutting, we actually see some interesting divergence where the Fed, whereas the Fed cuts, some emerging markets are actually hiking. Again emerging markets cover a lot of banks. So in this chart, there's a wide range of emerging markets. You can just focus on the median or you can focus on the range. But it's very clear that something has changed over the past few years, whereas emerging markets are becoming more and more able to stand up on their own and do their own thing less captive to what the Fed does.
Now there's a couple of reasons, potential reasons for this. One is that, well, the emerging markets are just dealing with different things right now. So for example, even as inflation is very low in the US, in Brazil, it's heating up. And so you have the Brazilian central bank, hike rates the same day that the Fed cut rates. So you have some idiosyncratic things that are going on there. And secondly, another potential change is that as time goes on, emerging markets are having more stable domestic capital markets. So they're maybe less impacted by what happens in abroad, maybe less reliant on foreign investors.
So as they have a more stable set of domestic investors that really want to hold domestic currency investments, maybe they don't need to be as beholden to what the Fed does. Some interesting diversions is happening here. And maybe it is one more step away from dollar dominance that we've been accustomed to over the past few decades. Certainly what we see, we see some developments political and so forth, but again, very early, but something interesting to keep in mind.
All right. So that's all I prepared for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. And as usual, if you're interested in my latest thoughts, check out my blog at FedGuy.com interested in online courses learning about macro markets, check out my courses at centralbanking101.com. And also welcome to check out monetarymacro.com. All right. See you guys next time.