February China Economic Data Collapses Massively More Than Expected

While it may not be a surprise to too many people in the real world that Chinese macro-economic data for February was a disaster, it appears it was a massive shock to analysts and economists who forecast this data.

• Chinese Retail Sales crashed 20.5% YTD YoY – the first annual drop on record and four times worse than the -4.0% expectation

• Chinese Industrial Production collapsed 13.5% YTD YOY – the first annual drop on record and more than four times worse than the -3.0% expectation

• Fixed Asset Investment plunged 24.5% YTD YoY – the first annual drop and more than twelve times worse than the expected 2.% contraction.

And to go with those stunning numbers, Property Investment puked 16.3% YTD YoY and the Surveyed Jobless Rate exploded to a record 6.2%.

The retail collapse was across the board – restaurants and catering down 43.1%, clothing down 30.9%, jewelry down 41.1% are some of the bigger drops.

But… just wait for the recovery! Oh wait, you mean this recovery?

As HSBC’s Julien Zhu told Bloomberg Television, this is “unprecedented” adding that the recovery is pretty cautious so far, warning “it will be a Herculean task to completely reverse everything this month.”

Of course, with US futures already limit-down, we can’t really gauge any reaction yet though yuan is modestly weaker on the data.