China Stock Market Crash
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Chinese Market Crash in context. How big is the market, how many investors does it have and does it tell us anything about the wider Chinese economy?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this program from BBC Radio 4. I'm Tim Halford. |
| 0:05.5 | Hello and welcome to More or Less, the program that pursues statistical truth with the speed |
| 0:11.5 | of Usain Bolt, the tenacity of Mo Farah, and the chemical assistance. |
| 0:15.4 | You know what the Lord has said about my joke. |
| 0:18.7 | All right, Wes. Well anyway, this week we will look at migration, the science of sprinting, |
| 0:24.2 | and how to calculate the risks of e-cigarettes. And author Guru Madhavan will be teaching us to think |
| 0:31.0 | like an engineer. But first, you may have thought that the bottom had fallen out of China's world |
| 0:37.1 | this week. Black Monday. It's been dubbed Black Monday. Black Monday. A day which some people |
| 0:43.7 | are calling Black Monday. Black Monday, the great fall of China as it's been described. |
| 0:49.5 | Even the official Chinese news agency, Genoa, was calling it Black Monday, has shares in China |
| 0:55.1 | fell by 8%, with further falls on Tuesday and Wednesday and volatility ever since. Crisis. |
| 1:03.8 | But wait, stop. Don't we need some context here? 8% of what? What's the trend been? Why does it matter? |
| 1:11.5 | I called James King, emerging markets editor at the Financial Times, and I began by asking him |
| 1:17.4 | a simple question. What do people mean when they say that trillions of dollars have been wiped off |
| 1:23.2 | the Chinese stock market? What they're talking about is normally either the Shanghai market and |
| 1:29.0 | or the Shenzhen market. There are two stock markets in China. It's sometimes not clear whether they're |
| 1:35.2 | meaning both together or they're just meaning one. If they're meaning one, it's most likely they're |
| 1:40.6 | talking about the Shanghai market and they're referring to the total reduction in the market |
| 1:48.0 | capitalization on that day. But this is a highly misleading figure. Why? Because the market |
| 1:56.8 | capitalization measures the value of all the companies listed. It doesn't measure the investable |
| 2:04.6 | pool of money in the stock market. In most stock markets around the world, particularly |
| 2:10.2 | such as the US, the investable pool and the market capitalization are virtually the same. |
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