Chinese stock market like 'a pig on LSD'

A Kune Kune pig - probably not on LSD. Herald file pic.

In what has been a big week for pig jokes a US hedge fund manager has used a porcine theme to come up with one of the greatest stock market quotes, ever.

Jim Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates, which famously predicted the 2001 collapse of Enron Corporation, was taking part in a New York panel discussion when the conversation moved on to the Chinese sharemarket rout that has erased trillions of dollars in investor value over the past few months.

"It's just a highly speculative market," Bloomberg quoted Chanos as saying.

Then came the gold.

"It's like a pig on LSD," Chanos said of the volatility in Chinese equities. "You don't know which way it's going to run."

The Shanghai Composite Index surged by 150 per cent in the year to June 12, but has slumped by 40 per cent since then in a sell-off which has contributed to heightened volatility in global financial markets.

Meanwhile markets across Asia are having another bad day today after worse than expected manufacturing data was released in China.

The Shanghai Composite is down 2.2 per cent, while the China Enterprise Index in Hong Kong had plunged 4.3 per cent.

Japan's Nikkei had fallen 1.9 per cent and New Zealand's S&P/NZX 50 was down 0.82 per cent just before 3.30pm.

Chanos was also quoted by Bloomberg as saying the Chinese Government had made "miss-steps" in its handling of the country's sharemarket crisis.

Beijing has spent 1.5 trillion yuan ($376 billion) since mid-June trying to control its plunging stock markets, according to Goldman Sachs.

Chanos said the Chinese economy was "addicted to credit" and was on a similar trajectory to the one Japan took in the lead-up to its 1991 asset-price collapse.