Stimulus Checks Are BACK!

Stimulus Checks are back folks!

I don’t want to hide the ball, so I’ll clarify right upfront this is in China — but here’s why I’m telling you about it, and why it might become very relevant to YOU soon.

Because usually what happens in China first then happens in the USA.

You see, all these Central Bankers have to coordinate together, otherwise things crash in one country and that takes the whole system down.

So with “Stimmy” Checks back in China, is it just a matter of time before the hit the USA?

Take a look:

China to Give Cash Handouts to the Poor in Rare Use of Aid… Stimmy's in China! $baba $JD pic.twitter.com/voX0C6ypIv

— crypto.Darren🪝 🏴‍☠️ (@Fame21Moore) September 27, 2024

This is a bit unusual as China usually doesn’t give direct stimulus checks to the poorest of the poor….but that’s what they’re doing this time.

Yes, saw an article earlier China is giving out stimulus checks to its citizens in a week or so.

Wow, what a turn of events this is.

Thanks for your excellent reporting. https://t.co/cCOLBBmWTi

— DragonGrog (@dragon_grog) September 26, 2024

China is handing out stimmy checks and letting banks borrow $113 billion to buy stocks and you're bearish? pic.twitter.com/r5CND0QYNd

— Joe Consorti ⚡️ (@JoeConsorti) September 25, 2024

This all comes on the heels of massive rate cuts and easing of standards for real estate lending to boost the failing real estate market:

🇨🇳 China announces $140B stimulus and multiple rate cuts, causing the BIGGEST weekly gain since 2008. pic.twitter.com/9gvRHd6Gc6

— mracrypto (@MRA_crypto) September 27, 2024

China revealed a huge stimulus package to boost liquidity, help its economy, & prop up its stock market.

It is making a $113-billion facility to boost lending & let banks borrow money to buy Chinese stocks.

The PBOC promises more stimulus if this isn't enough.@TheyaBitcoin pic.twitter.com/pl2V6NlM8o

— Joe Consorti ⚡️ (@JoeConsorti) September 24, 2024

As is often the case, my friend MeetKevin has one of the best breakdowns of what is going on.

I think this will really help lay it all out.

Watch here:

Full transcript:

Stimulus checks are back. This is not something I thought I would be covering for China, but yes, stimulus checks have just been announced for, quote, “the poor” before their National Day. Ministries of Finance and Civil Affairs are apparently going to offer living subsidies to disadvantaged groups, including very poor people and orphans. Local authorities are trying to get this money out before October 1st.

This is very, very rare. Usually, you only see stimulus from the top down in China, and this sort of exacerbates the deflationary spiral that they’ve been facing. We’ll get into more details on these checks in just a moment, but consider this: what’s really important right now in China are the expectations of further policy support. Analysts and experts on China say that right now, this sort of “stimulus bazooka” we got over the last 24 hours from The People’s Bank of China is not enough to change market dynamics just yet.

In fact, if you just take a look at the Hang Seng index — this is sort of your, uh, yeah, I think it’s 52 or 58 constituents that make up somewhere around 80% of the Chinese market cap — if you look at them yesterday morning, well, I mean, their version of today when their market opened, they were going to be up somewhere around 4%. But take a look at this: the market already sold that 4% off down to just 68 basis points of gains. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still positive, but you could see it went straight down. Futures were the rest of the difference here.

Anyway, look at the NIA over here. The NIA also ran initially, fell, ran into lunch, fell, ran, fell — just couldn’t keep it up. You did have the DAX over in Germany start rotating at least towards the positive direction; it did rotate up yesterday on the news of this Chinese stimulus. Their market’s obviously still open at this point in time but only sitting at 32 basis points, so you’re not even up. You had oil rally yesterday, about 2%, and now it’s down almost 2% again, oil and the international blend Brent. So it’s almost like markets are really skeptical of this Chinese stimulus.

Is this actually going to be enough to keep the Chinese economy out of a recession? If you look at gold, the answer is probably no. You just hit another record high, 2682, right now. We’re almost at $2,700 an ounce for gold — it’s been an incredible mover.

Now, some other facts and details regarding the stimulus. Deflation is, unfortunately for China, very structural. I see in the comments a lot of people are hoping that we’ll have deflation in the United States, but deflation is self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling, and it’s usually associated with a recession. It’s usually associated with losing your job. We look at this as like, “Oh, prices will be lower, great,” but you won’t be able to afford anything because you won’t have work. This deceleration is very bad in China, and frankly, it’s gathering momentum — it’s not slowing down; it’s basically getting worse faster.

So yes, hopefully, this latest stimulus bazooka that we’ve seen can help China get ahead, but so far, the more China stimulates to build out capex, the more you create a deflationary spiral of more manufacturing, more potential manufacturing jobs, and more deflation, as you now have created more competition even though the market’s not asking for that. That’s why now you’re getting a fiscal policy response of, “Okay, let’s give poor people checks.” That’s great and could be a good chunk of money for some. I don’t think it’ll be this high. I think they’ll really broaden out how many people receive these, but there are currently 4.74 million extremely poor people in China, and they’re allocating about 22 billion dollars.

So, if we take $22 billion and divide it by 4.74 million people, that could be as much as about $4,600 per person. Now, given that China has a population of over 1.5 billion people, I suspect that more than just 4.7 million will be eligible for these checks, so they’ll probably be closer to something like what we saw during COVID in China, which was around $500 per person. In the United States, we had stimulus of somewhere around $6,000 per person on average.

National Day is a major holiday. It usually sees a lot of travel and consumption, so they’re hoping this will offset the property slump and the pretty gloomy stock market they’ve had. You’re starting to see central bankers actually sort of appreciating the idea that, “Okay, cool, maybe if we just pump the stock market to all-time highs, we can keep the economy out of recession,” and frankly, so far it’s working.

Look at the United States, for example. Atlanta Fed now real GDP data shows us at a 2.99% estimate for Q3 GDP. We get a GDP report tomorrow, so pay attention to that. And wow, we’re pricing in a 59% chance right now of getting a 50-basis-point cut in November already, which is pretty remarkable.

Tomorrow, September 26th, at 5:30 in the morning, we’ll be getting a GDP annualized quarter-over-quarter report. Keep in mind, that’s just the third read for Q2, so it’s kind of old data. It’s not really going to help us a lot. Same thing for the GDP price data for Q2. I think what’s going to be more useful and more likely to move the market is that, at the same time, we’ll be getting unemployment claims and continuing claims. We’re expecting 224,000 unemployment claims and 1.826 million continuing claims, so we’ll see.

We will get durable orders and cap goods, but I don’t think those will be as pressing as the unemployment claim numbers. This all comes at the same time as now China has apparently launched the first ICBM into international water since the 1980s, which is kind of crazy to see. It’s also a little scary because it’s like, “Wait a minute, why are you doing this, China?” It’s like they’re trying to show us that they, too, can be a boss. Not great, not great.

There are also expectations that this is just the beginning of more easing. For example, they cut their medium loan facility rates down to 2% from 2.3%. It’s a 30-basis-point cut — the largest since 2016. The yuan is obviously strengthening on this because the United States is cutting rates and there are concerns about a potential recession. They are now actively stimulating on both a fiscal and economic side.

There’s some talk that China might end up reducing the rates that people and corporations get on their deposits. They haven’t done that yet, but there’s talk they might. If they do that, you could see inflows into spending, or it’ll just make people even more nervous because that’s what happens during deflationary times — people get more nervous and purposefully stop spending. So, we’ll see.

Markets continue to look for any signs of recession in unemployment claim numbers. Personally, I’ve said it before, I think it’s kind of nonsensical to look at unemployment claim numbers, mostly because you generally don’t see a large wave of unemployment until you’re already in a recession. You don’t see those unemployment claims until it’s already too late, so we’ll see.

But what would be good is seeing the opposite, right? Let’s see those 27 weeks unemployed and longer start declining again. Let’s start seeing these unemployment claim numbers come in even lower. Those are things that could potentially indicate things are getting better, not worse.

Right now, if we look at the 27 weeks unemployed, we see a pretty solid uptick over here on the right. If you zoom out, you always get an uptick like that in a recession. You generally don’t see the upticks absent a recession. I mean, you had a little uptick over here in ‘63, but it looks like the magnitude is a little larger over here. We’ll see.

The trajectory of these numbers now will determine how much markets try to price in a recession. Keep in mind that very few people think we’re going to have a recession with certainty, which is exactly what I would expect going into a recession. Most people aren’t going to think we’re in a recession yet.

Let’s take a look at this. The Conference Board did a reading on this. Look at this: the Expectations Index based on consumers’ short-term outlook declined to 81.7 but remains above 80. A reading below 80 is usually the threshold of a recession ahead. The proportion of consumers anticipating a recession over the next 12 months remains low, so not quite in the recession category yet in terms of sentiment data. But this is exactly what they’re trying to U-turn in China, where they’re trying to get ahead of this miserable sentiment. We’ll see what happens as time goes on.