I don’t mean opening up the entire stock market to the world, but just making it more investable for the Chinese people. The stock market can be successful within China with Chinas huge savings rate. The way I see it, if they want to improve consumption they have to either improve their stock market or improve safety nets. Wage increase alone wont crack it unless everyone somehow becomes UAE local levels of rich.I don’t think that is feasible for China. Chinas political system is different, with the party prioritizing their absolute control over the market at all cost. So I don’t think it’s realistic to expect them to open up the capital and stock markets anytime this century.
so I think it’s better to look at others sectors which is much more likely to be liberalized, but definitely not the stock/capital markets.
If they don’t do either of these, then nobody will consume and people will continue to shove their money into savings or funnel it out of China. China will have to continue subsidizing and relying on export, bringing more debt. It’s just not sustainable. Even if they introduce more capital controls, so long as there is no safe and good way to build wealth in China, people will always try to smuggle it out.
Improving social welfare for over a billion people would be insanely costly and bring huge debt and I don’t see much effort towards it. This along with the extra benefits of a growing stock market for chinas current situation make me think that they will likely put effort into fixing the stock market.
Like I said before (Assuming low social welfare, which is the current situation) people will always funnel their money out if wealth building prospects in China are terrible compared to the outside world. And no matter the capital controls, humans are humans and they’ll always find a way. However, you give them a good way to grow their money inside the country then they will feel less need to escape and less motivated to skirt capital controls.
I think that capital controls and stabilizing the stock market will be a big influence on drawing China’s massive savings (which are sitting doing nothing) into the stock market, allowing Chinese people to build wealth, companies to have massively more capital to grow their business/industries, and reduce debt by reducing the need for subsidizing. All of this on top of increasing consumption. I see growing the stock market (along with their consistent progress on wage increase) as currently, the only viable option for China to grow their consumption and transition to a more healthy economy.
Last edited: