Year of the Goat brings uncertainty but also optimism

Chinese New Year is a strange time in Hong Kong. Flat-bed trucks rattle along the streets bearing tangerine trees with little red envelopes stuffed with money hanging from the branches. Incredibly, the Apple Store is closed in the International Financial Centre, and most of the traffic on the streets appears to be people bearing gifts and visiting relatives.

In Hong Kong, the event lasts two days – enough for a long weekend this year, although most shops will open again on Saturday – but it's a week-long event in mainland China. Despite the slowing economy across the border in Shenzhen, it's all business as usual, though many of the workers have gone home to their ancestral family bases.

Factory owners will wonder if this will a year when people choose not to come back from their lunar new year holidays with family, instead returning later and simply taking another job with a different company. With the slowing economy, turnover is not likely to be as high as in previous years but it will still prove a headache for employers working to contract deadlines.

Markets in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong went quiet, as did the markets in countries with a big Chinese population such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

The feng shui necromancers got it right last year, saying the year of the horse would be messy. But what kind of year will the year of the sheep (or goat) be?

GDP growth eased to 7.4 per cent in 2014 year, the lowest since 1990, and the government in Beijing expects growth of about 7 per cent for this year.

Lunar new year came late this year, so it will inevitably distort the economic data for January, February and March as economists don’t like to overinterpret moves in data from the weeks around the holiday. A lot depends on how you read the phrase “new normal”. Everyone is keen to understand what the government means by the phrase.

Premier Li Keqiang, who is generally responsible for the economy, said China was focusing on "higher-quality growth for the long run". That means less of a focus on overall GDP growth and a move away from labour-intensive exports towards a more service-orientated economy, with emphasis on domestic demand.

Desert wars In geopolitical terms, goat years are dry earth years, so they tend to involve wars in the desert. 1991, 2003 . . . 2015?

Traditionally after the seven-day holiday, most Chinese stock markets rally – this has happened four out of the last five times, on waves of new year optimism, shared by 70 per cent of investors in a survey by the Shanghai Securities News. This year, the focus will be more on smaller- cap shares, according to the survey.

The biggest concerns are generally externally linked, the survey showed, including overseas market fluctuations, capital outflow triggered by the depreciation of the yuan, domestic debt and worse-than- expected domestic debt.

There are 12 zodiac animals – rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep/goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Goats are seen as loyal, notoriously stubborn, but also sure-footed and brave, and probably the goat year will not bring any major slips. Despite growing misgivings about the world’s second largest economy, it’s still growing faster than any other country of that scale.

Kung hei fat choi!