The Chinese Are Coming, Part XVIII. It’s The Stimulus Stupid.

“Who’s going to turn down a Junior Mint? It’s chocolate, it’s peppermint, it’s delicious. It’s very refreshing.”
Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld, episode #60
When I was in law school, I was rankled by students who complained about how busy they were. I mean, we were all taking pretty much the same courses. I swore I would never engage in that whine and I never did.
Bloggers who apologize for being too busy to post also rankle me. I swore we would never make that excuse on this blog and for more than three years, we haven’t. But today, talking about how I have been too busy to post much is the perfect segue to this post and so I cannot resist.
The reality is that my firm has been crazy busy of late and it has been due mostly to China’s stimulus. Now I am not a big fan of government intervention and I see government stimuli (that is the plural of stimulus, I looked it up) as the equivalent of a sugar rush (see Junior Mints above), but man, while it is happening, it is even better than chocolate.
My firm is getting stimulus work both coming and going (and if you see any sexual innuendo in this sentence I can’t help you). I am going to have to be vague here (and even mix the facts up a bit) because none of these matters are out there in the public realm yet (though one is likely to hit the media any day now), but the following is what has been keeping me down/up lately:
1. We have been working on a large deal for a Chinese company that received a China bank loan along with pretty strong “instructions to do a deal in the United States.”
2. We have been working on a large deal for a Chinese company here in the United States that was able to severely undercut the pricing of its competitors because it recently started receiving Chinese government subsidies to do these sorts of deals outside China.
3. We have been working with a Chinese company looking to establish a factory on the West Coast, again, pretty clearly at the direction of the Chinese government, which has loaned them a boatload of money to do exactly this.
4. We have been working on a China joint venture for a US big equipment company (this is meant to be vague and is not the same thing as heavy equipment) that was asked to go into China by a Chinese company to take advantage of the massive uptick in need for this sort of equipment due to increased Chinese government infrastructure spending.
5. We have been working with a US company whose sales of big equipment (vague again) into China have doubled in the last six months due to increased Chinese government infrastructure spending.
And, needless to say, it’s not just us. The Wall Street Journal did a story on this about a week ago, entitled, “China’s Stimulus Spurs U.S. Business,” but hey, I was too busy to write on it then….
China Stakes notes that China’s overseas investment in 2009 will, for the first time, very likely exceed incoming investment into China.
Junior Mint, anyone?
What are you seeing out there?