The Chinese money supply

Derek Scissors reports:

Broad money M2 breached $20tn at the end of December, a staggering 70 per cent larger than in the US, where monetary policy has hardly been tight.

There’s a tremendous amount of liquidity, the problem is no one is using it. Growth in narrow money M1 has collapsed. It was a dangerously excessive 32.4 per cent in 2009. It was a dangerously anemic 3.2 per cent in 2014.

M1 is money being held ready for use in anticipated transactions. It should correlate very well with GDP, which is a sum of transaction values. But while M1 flies around over time, GDP growth barely budges in comparison. It strains credulity that the amount of money held for use could grow at one-tenth the speed in 2014 as it did in 2009, yet growth in uses of that money (GDP) drops less than 2 points.

The FT post is of more interest generally on Chinese economic statistics.