The recent turmoil in the financial markets worldwide does not seem to have hit the Chinese. The Shanghai Composite index keeps on rising and is now at 4955, which is a gain of nearly 400% over the last two years. Has the world ever seen a more obvious stock market bubble? There was a bit of a scare in February, when everybody thought the Shanghai stock market would crash and drag the world along with it. Since then it has gone up by about 70% more! Even when global markets have plunged over the last few weeks, the Shanghai stock market has kept on chugging along upwards, after a bit of a wobble in June and July.
When is this house of cards going to come down? Nobody knows - many analysts have been calling a top since the beginning of this year, but Shanghai keeps on ignoring these warnings. But when it does come down many Chinese investors (big and small) will learn the hard reality that stock markets can actually crash. What effects this eventual popping of the Chinese stock bubble will have is hard to predict, but be sure that they will be big in some way. The Chinese do everything in a big way - the Great Wall, the Three Gorges Dams, and so on.
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