Too early to celebrate financial bonanza of baby boom

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. The same can be probably said of a growing market buzz about monetizing millions of babies before they are even born.

Before the public learned last weekend, after a key meeting of the Communist Party, that all Chinese couples will be allowed to have two children, some demographers and economists had already heightened their expectations about a baby boom of sorts. The experts predicted 1 million to more than 5 million additional newborns annually. The scrapping of the one-child policy, they argued, would encourage people to spend more as well as replenish China's shrinking labor pool.

One Chinese stock brokerage has projected yearly increases in births by 1 million to 2 million, which it claims could represent 120 billion yuan ($19 billion) to 160 billion yuan in consumer spending and trigger "exponential growth" for business in milk powder, toys, baby and child care, clothes and family cars.