China Knows a Thing or Two About Trader Tantrums
A big rush of stimulus won’t calm markets. You need to dole out smaller bits more frequently, as Beijing has been doing.
Not. happy.
Photographer: Evening Standard/Hulton ArchiveQuantitative easing, fiscal stimulus. Despite the billions of dollars promised, it seems global financial markets can’t stop sliding. Meanwhile China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, has remained an ocean of relative calm. How has Beijing managed to pull this off?
Christine Lagarde, for one, must be desperate to know. The European Central Bank president got a taste of traders’ impossible expectations Thursday, when they starting dumping stocks even before she spoke, disappointed that expected rate cuts hadn’t materialized. Lagarde failed to demonstrate the “whatever it takes” attitude of her predecessor that we all wanted to see.