Summary of the Essential Eight:

1. Reopening

2. Sweet talk for business - Li Keqiang made another round of supportive remarks for businesses, including for platform companies, and said tax and fee cuts should continue.

3. Inflation data

4. More support for real estate developers - Regulators are pulling back from the “three red lines” introduced to reduce leverage, and messaging banks to “lean forward” in extending credit to developers. As we have discussed repeatedly, these moves are a significant backdown from the attempts to deleverage the real estate sector, though so far little that has been effective has been done on the demand side to spur people to go into the real estate market. Backing down is better than melting down, which is where the sector was headed last year.

5. US-Japan-China: A new era of strategic competition - Japan and the US have signed on to “A New Era of Strategic Competition”. US and Japanese security officials met in DC in advance of Japan prime minister Fumio Kishida meeting U…