#时事热点头条说#
On August 30, the reporter of "Securities Daily" interviewed a number of industry insiders, looking forward to the CPI (consumer price index) and PPI (national industrial producer factory price) data in August, and it is generally believed that driven by the steady recovery of domestic demand and the decline in last year's base, the year-on-year increase in CPI in August may turn from negative to positive. At the same time, the year-on-year decline in PPI in August will be narrowed due to factors such as higher commodity prices such as energy and the weakening of last year's base effect.
Every time before the release of CPI data, there are media and experts began to predict how the CPI is positive or negative, how the high and low are, the reasons for the change, there are always a few, market demand has changed, the same period last year is high, pork, vegetable prices, upside down, no novelty, and no reference value for decision-making.
In fact, when the CPI has been running at a low level for a long time, and the outside world has evaluated such a low level of operation in one way or another, and even believes that China has experienced deflation, how should domestic analysts, especially experts, respond to such evaluation and analysis? Obviously, there are not many people who are really going deep into reality, understanding the situation, and analyzing the reasons, and more are people following the clouds, and they have no own views at all.
One phenomenon that must be paid attention to is that in the same face of currency over-issuance and the same rise in commodity prices in the international market, Western developed countries are generally mired in inflation, but China's CPI continues to decline. More importantly, China's economic growth rate is much higher than that of Western developed countries, and it should face greater inflationary pressure, in addition to China's relatively strong policy measures to deal with inflation, the policy role is more obvious, such as controlling the rise in coal prices, strictly prohibiting price gouging, cracking down on unauthorized price increases, etc., are there other reasons?
In order to cope with the global financial crisis, but also in order to cope with the impact and impact of the epidemic, in order to ensure employment, from the global financial crisis to the present, investment has been an important force driving China's economic growth, from the initial urban construction investment to real estate investment, and then to major infrastructure investment, transportation investment, water conservancy investment, aviation investment, people's livelihood facilities investment in recent years, most of them are unproductive investment, is long-term investment, low input-output efficiency and long return time investment. A considerable part of them are investments with no economic benefits and only social benefits. That is to say, most of the invested funds are precipitated in the field of fixed asset investment, more directly, reinforced concrete, without immediately forming an output effect, and the capital turnover rate is extremely low. Compared with productive investment, the turnover efficiency of funds for the same dollar may be only one-fifth, one-tenth or even lower than that of productive investment. If part of these investments were converted into productive investments, they would likely be much more productive and much less funded.
The fact is also that according to the data released by the central bank, the broad money supply at the end of 2008 was 47 trillion, and by the end of 2022, the broad money supply has reached 266 trillion, and in 14 years, the broad money supply has increased by 219 trillion, with an average annual increase of 15.6 trillion. At such a speed of money supply, both CPI and PPI should be very high, and CPI is unlikely to fluctuate within 2%, let alone negative growth. There is only one reason, that is, the liquidity of funds is too poor, the vast majority of funds are in a state of illiquidity or slow flow, and some may be transferred, becoming "negative flow" and "false flow".
If nothing else, real estate development enterprises alone do not know how much money has been deposited, such as Evergrande, with debts of more than 2.4 trillion yuan, and bank loans of more than 600 billion yuan. These funds are either deposited on land, or on real estate, or in the accounts of Evergrande managers, of course, it is not ruled out that some funds have been transferred. An enterprise has so much capital precipitation, how many real estate development enterprises in the country, and how many investments are the same as real estate development enterprises, and how can funds flow. Money is not flowing, where there is benefit, where there is efficiency. Let residents use the little savings they have in their hands, and have to deal with a large amount of debt to drive consumption, the market, and the CPI, it is too difficult for the majority of residents, and it is too high to look at the consumption power of the majority of residents.
Think of the 80s and 90s of the last century, in the face of hundreds of billions of household savings deposits, the decision-making level and management were very nervous, thinking that this was a caged tiger, worried that once the tiger "escaped" from the tiger cage, it would trigger serious inflation. However, the current resident savings deposits have far exceeded the current year, as of the end of December 2022, the balance of resident savings deposits was 121 trillion yuan, but the CPI was less than 2%, why? Why today's household savings are no longer caged tigers and no longer hurt people. On the one hand, household debt is also growing rapidly, with the balance of resident debt reaching 84.5 trillion yuan as of the end of June 2022, equivalent to 70% of the balance of household savings. On the other hand, the cost of education, medical care and other expenses is also very high, resulting in residents simply not having much financial resources to spend on other aspects of consumption, and even the necessities of life must be saved. Where does the CPI improve?
It is precisely because of this that the low CPI should not always think that it is caused by the high base of the previous year, the decline in pork prices, and the stability of vegetable prices, but the pace of investment expansion is too fast, the proportion of non-productive investment is too high, the input and output efficiency is too low, and the liquidity of funds is too poor.