Finance

China retail sales strengthen at start of 2025, industrial data beats

Published

14 hours ago

March 16, 2025

Business Finance News

Pictured here is a Shanghai development under construction on Nov. 4, 2024.

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

China’s economy showed a modest pickup for the first two months of the year, according to data published Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics, as Beijing reiterated its plan to bolster domestic consumption.

Retail sales rose by 4.0% in the January-February period from a year ago, compared with the 3.7% year-on-year growth in December and in line with Reuters estimates.

Industrial production climbed 5.9% in the first two months of the year from a year ago, slower than the 6.2% growth in December, but faster than a 5.3% expansion forecast by analysts in a Reuters poll.

Fixed asset investment, reported on a year-to-date basis, rose by 4.1%, beating the 3.6% growth estimated by economists, a notable jump from the 3.2% increase last year.

The data comes shortly after Chinese policymakers unveiled a wide-ranging plan to stimulate domestic consumption, reiterating Beijing’s pledges to bolster residents’ income and household spending.

The notice, published Sunday, repeated Beijing’s plan to stabilize the stock market, establish a childcare subsidy scheme as well as boosting tourism.

While the high-level document appears to lack concrete implementation details, it provides a glance into Beijing’s stance toward addressing some deep-seated issues, such as the slowing income growth and insufficient social safety net, Lynn Song, chief China economist at ING, told CNBC via email.

“Directionally it is quite encouraging that policymakers are taking a sober look at these themes, and it should help the longer term transition to a consumption driven economy,” he added.

Growth target

Chinese leadership took on a hefty task by keeping a growth target of “around 5%” this year, a target seen harder to reach given rising trade tensions with the U.S. and entrenched deflationary pressure for the economy.

Economists say Beijing will likely need to provide stronger stimulus to achieve this year’s growth target and bolster domestic consumption to fill the hole left by potentially slowing exports. Exports contributed nearly a quarter of China’s GDP last year.

In a sign of a persistent drop in demand, China’s consumer price inflation in February fell below zero for the first time in over a year. Beijing revised down its annual inflation target to “around 2%” — the lowest in more than two decades — from above 3% in prior years, a move seen to show a degree of official acceptance of the current deflationary environment.

As part of an expanded fiscal package, Chinese leaders pledged at an annual parliamentary meeting earlier this month an additional 300 billion yuan ($41.5 billion) of ultra-long special treasury bonds for consumers’ subsidy support.

Still, beyond the trade-in program, the existing stimulus measures have barely targeted consumers directly.

Finance

Deutsche Bank says the market sell-off has another 6% to go

Published

28 minutes ago

March 17, 2025

Business Finance News

The market sell-off is not over yet as consumer and corporate confidence take a dive on tariff uncertainty, according to Deutsche Bank. “We see the selloff in US equities as having further to go,” Binky Chadha, chief strategist at Deutsche Bank, wrote Saturday. “With trade policy uncertainty likely to continue to weigh, at least until April 2, we expect positioning to continue to unwind.” “A move to the bottom of the positioning band which is where it went to in the last trade war, would take the S & P 500 down to 5250,” Chadha added. The S & P 500 level highlighted by Chadha points to another 6.9% decline from Friday’s close of 5,638.94. The benchmark was last about 8% below the all-time high it reached just last month. .SPX YTD bar S & P 500 At the center of the strategist’s call are concerns of an economic slowdown amid tariff uncertainty that are unlikely to abate for at least the next several weeks. The latest earnings season showed CEOs are slashing capital expenditures and cutting their earnings forecasts. Chadha also expects the idea of a “Trump put” — in which the president will ease on his policies that have destabilized the market — will not be realized until a marked turn lower in Trump’s approval ratings. “Compared to the level of consumer confidence, the current approval rating is high, implying plenty of room for downside with negative growth or inflation developments likely to speed the catch down,” Chadha wrote. “We expect the net approval rating has to turn more significantly negative, at least -5%, before the administration starts to consider responding.” Still, Chadha — who held one of the more bullish outlooks heading into 2025 — said that it’s “too early to throw in the towel” on his year-end target of 7,000, a move that’s more than 24% higher from Friday’s close. He thinks stocks can bounce back sharply in the latter part of the year if there’s a resolution on tariff uncertainty. On Monday, at least, the broad index rose slightly as it tries to claw back its recent losses. The move came after the latest U.S. retail sales report showed consumers are still spending though at a slower pace than expected. “While the risks have grown, for now we maintain our year-end S & P 500 target of 7000,” he said.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on March 14, 2025 in New York City.

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

The market sell-off is not over yet as consumer and corporate confidence take a dive on tariff uncertainty, according to Deutsche Bank.

“We see the selloff in US equities as having further to go,” Binky Chadha, chief strategist at Deutsche Bank, wrote Saturday. “With trade policy uncertainty likely to continue to weigh, at least until April 2, we expect positioning to continue to unwind.”

“A move to the bottom of the positioning band which is where it went to in the last trade war, would take the S&P 500 down to 5250,” Chadha added.

The S&P 500 level highlighted by Chadha points to another 6.9% decline from Friday’s close of 5,638.94. The benchmark was last about 8% below the all-time high it reached just last month.

S&P 500

At the center of the strategist’s call are concerns of an economic slowdown amid tariff uncertainty that are unlikely to abate for at least the next several weeks. The latest earnings season showed CEOs are slashing capital expenditures and cutting their earnings forecasts.

Chadha also expects the idea of a “Trump put” — in which the president will ease on his policies that have destabilized the market — will not be realized until a marked turn lower in Trump’s approval ratings.

“Compared to the level of consumer confidence, the current approval rating is high, implying plenty of room for downside with negative growth or inflation developments likely to speed the catch down,” Chadha wrote. “We expect the net approval rating has to turn more significantly negative, at least -5%, before the administration starts to consider responding.”

Still, Chadha — who held one of the more bullish outlooks heading into 2025 — said that it’s “too early to throw in the towel” on his year-end target of 7,000, a move that’s more than 24% higher from Friday’s close. He thinks stocks can bounce back sharply in the latter part of the year if there’s a resolution on tariff uncertainty.

On Monday, at least, the broad index rose slightly as it tries to claw back its recent losses. The move came after the latest U.S. retail sales report showed consumers are still spending though at a slower pace than expected.

“While the risks have grown, for now we maintain our year-end S&P 500 target of 7000,” he said.

Finance

Buffett hikes stakes in five Japanese trading houses to almost 10% each

Published

3 hours ago

March 17, 2025

Business Finance News

Warren Buffett speaks during the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 4, 2024.

CNBC

Warren Buffett’s love for Japanese stocks grows fonder even as he increasingly sells U.S. equities.

The 94-year-old investor’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company raised its holdings in five Japanese trading houses — Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo — by more than 1 percentage point each, to stakes ranging from 8.5% to 9.8%, according to a regulatory filing.

The “Oracle of Omaha” said in his 2024 annual letter that Berkshire is committed to its Japanese investments for the long term and has reached an agreement with the companies to go beyond an initial 10% ceiling.

All five are the biggest “sogo shosha,” or trading houses, in Japan that invest across diverse sectors domestically and abroad — “in a manner somewhat similar to Berkshire itself,” Buffett said. Berkshire first bought into the companies in the summer of 2019.

Part of the investment strategy involves Buffett hedging currency risk by selling Japanese debt and then pocketing the difference between dividends from the investments and the bond coupon payments he has to make to service the debt.

At the end of 2024, the market value of Berkshire’s Japanese holdings came to $23.5 billion, at an aggregate cost of $13.8 billion. The investor praised the companies’ managements, relationships with their investors and their capital deployment strategies.

Buffett first unveiled the Japanese positionsd on his 90th birthday in August 2020 after making regular purchases on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, saying he was “confounded” by the opportunity and was attracted to the trading houses’ dividend growth.

In 2023, Buffett even paid a visit to Japan with his designated successor Greg Abel and met with the heads of the Japanese firms. He said he’d like Berkshire to own the companies forever.

The student of famed investor Benjamin Graham has been aggressively selling U.S. stocks and growing his record cash pile to $334 billion. Berkshire sold more than $134 billion worth of stocks in 2024, largely by shrinking the size of Berkshire’s two largest equity holdings — Apple and Bank of America.