China’s stockmarket melt-up will end in tears

China's stockmarkets are up by 13% so far this year, but the rally could end in a brutal crash.

People in Beijing
China’s consumers have joined in the rebound © Getty
(Image credit: © Jia Tianyong/China News Service via Getty Images)

China is on course for a “swift ‘V-shaped recovery’”, says Gurpreet Narwan in The Times. Post-lockdown industrial indicators have been improving for some time, and now consumers have joined in the rebound. The services sector is advancing at the fastest rate in ten years.

China’s thorough approach to eradicating the virus has enabled consumers to feel confident enough to go out and spend again, says Jonathan Cheng in The Wall Street Journal. The economy suffered its first GDP contraction in decades in the first quarter, but the International Monetary Fund thinks that China will be the only big economy to register growth for 2020 as a whole.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.