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...trading room at Huaxia Securities, one of mainland China's three biggest brokerage houses, is a place where Beijing residents gather to monitor the stock ticker and hunch over computer keyboards while they buy and sell shares of 1,378 listed Chinese companies. Like casinos, Huaxia supplies VIP rooms to high-stakes customers. After the central government's disclosure last week that China's surging economy registered unexpectedly rapid GDP growth of 9.5% in the fourth quarter of 2004, the VIP rooms should have been buzzing. But they were empty, while the atmosphere in the main room was morose...
...world's most dynamic economy have Asia's most catatonic stock markets? That's a conundrum China's financial regulators have tried but failed to address since 2001, when an ebullient market bubble burst and local investors headed for the exits. In the latest effort to revive deflated stock prices and boost trading volume, the government last week announced that stock-transaction taxes would be cut by 50% for the second time in three years, and that initial public offerings would be resumed after a five-month suspension while other new rules designed to attract investors were implemented...
...Similar moves in the past have done little to rekindle trading. The combined index for China's two bourses, in Shanghai and Shenzhen, is down 46% from its 2001 peak. Last year, the bourses lost 15% of their combined value, one of the worst stock-market performances in the world; they are currently trading near six-year lows. Meanwhile, the weekly trading volume on the Shanghai exchange has plummeted nearly sixfold, from a high of 178 billion yuan during the week ending Feb. 18, 2000, to 31 billion yuan last week...
...Incremental regulatory improvements have failed to reverse the slide because they are Band-Aid solutions to wide-ranging, well-known problems. China's stock markets are afflicted by poor regulatory supervision, rampant insider trading, lack of corporate transparency, shady stockbrokers, and frequent government intervention. Investors dislike uncertainty, and in China, risk takes many surprising forms. In November, for example, the government suddenly rotated the top executives of its four listed, state-owned telephone companies, sending them to work for former competitors. Corporate corruption is commonplace?police have confirmed criminal investigations at eight listed companies so far this year, according...
...forestall massive layoffs and keep a lid on civil unrest, the government has in the past propped up struggling SOEs with loans from state banks. But China's banking system is awash in bad loans, so now Beijing prefers companies to raise capital by going public. "Stock markets should be a vigorous entrepreneurial way to promote capitalism, but China uses them to manage the slow decline of state companies," says Matthew Rudolph, a fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs in Hanover, New Hampshire, who is writing a book on China's markets. Investors "are just helping the government...