Sunday, May 06, 2012

China Bullishness Slips Into Too Many Yahoo Stories

I'm going to start weaning myself from a reliance on Yahoo! Finance for information.  I'm increasingly disappointed with the selectively bad macroeconomic reporting they republish from the newswires and the editorializing that often slips in from Yahoo!'s amateur contributors.  Case in point is this puff piece restating the now-exhausted China bullish growth story.  I'm a former China bull myself and I now hate to admit that the story has run out of steam.

Rising wages and land prices in China are forcing distributors to move inland for cheaper options.  China's U.S. trade counterparties have logistics difficulties of their own.  Overinvestment in U.S. port infrastructure now looks bad as China's growth problems have ripple effects here.  Please tell stimulus fans that building infrastructure for its own sake turns lots of piers and cranes into white elephants when trade gets costly.

Anyway, I need more intelligent sources.  Yahoo! has disappointed me several times this year with stories hailing "job creation" in the U.S. even with millions of people dropping out of labor statistics in frustration over not finding employment.  I'm going to try configuring Google's custom settings to see if that will give me the news feeds I need.

Full disclosure:  Long FXI with covered calls.