China

Last June, China’s stock market miracle ended in tears.

The SHCOMP’s inexorable, parabolic ascent was to a large degree facilitated by an explosion of margin debt, the likes of which could not be found in any other major market across the globe. For instance, by the end of June, the outstanding balance of margin transactions as a percentage of the SHCOMP’s free float market cap was nearly 14% compared to just 5.5% for the S&P and less than 1% for the TOPIX.

The sarcastic highlight of the overnight session was the Chinese stock market, where just one month after injecting a record amount of new loans into the financial system, the PBOC lamented the danger posed by China's tremendous debt load: "Lending as a share of GDP, especially corporate lending as a share of GDP, is too high" People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan told China Development Forum yesterday.

The dream of transition to a 'consuming' economy just crashed into the wall of excess debt and leverage. 2016 has started with a 44% collapse in China passenger car sales. This is the biggest sequential crash and is 50% larger than any other plunge in history.

While there is a seasonal effect here obviously, the sheer scale of this 2-month drop - which removes the new year holiday affect - indicates something is terribly wrong in China.

It’s no secret by now that China has a rather serious debt problem.

Although getting a precise read on it is next to impossible, all told the debt pile probably sums to something like $30 trillion. Various reports put the figure at between 250% and 300% of GDP all-in and as we reported back in January, that may have swelled to more than 340% by the end of 2015.

As Evercore ISI (correctly) puts it, "no one can remember more than 7 bullets on anything." So for those eager to catch up on all the latest news out of China, here are just 7 bullet points: