In previous post, I analyzed inflation and hot money inflow in China. Now here is a piece from Michael Pettis. In it, he analayzes the composition of China’s capital inflow in the first four months of 2008.

“If this is true that means that reserves grew in the month of April by $74.5 billion, the biggest one-month reserve jump in China’s history (and probably in the history of the world)…

To get a sense of scale, in 2006 reserves were up $247 billion for the whole year. This, at the time, was a number guaranteed to shock. No central bank in history has seen reserve growth at anywhere near this scale. Nonetheless in 2007, the growth in reported reserves nearly doubled over the previous year — $462 billion – and more than doubled if we backed out a series of transactions that reduced headline reserve growth but had no net impact on the monetization of currency inflows…”

(click to enlarge, courtesy of Michael Pettis)