If at first you don’t succeed.

Beijing on Wednesday said Finance Minister Lan Fo’an will host a press event on Saturday, when the government will take a mulligan and try again to pacify anxious markets following Zheng Shanjie’s underwhelming performance earlier this week.

Zheng, you’ll recall, was expected to announce a raft of fiscal stimulus measures at a Tuesday briefing. Instead, he regaled the media with familiar talking points and allusions to previously-announced measures. Chinese equities, which staged a world-beating rally last month, plunged in Hong Kong. On Wednesday, the unwind continued.

Mainland shares fell more than 7%, their worst rout since February 3, 2020 (when the mainland re-opened after an extended Lunar New Year holiday around the onset of the pandemic) and before that, the harrowing days around 2015’s burst-bubble.

Some of the price action was expected. Just as A-shares rallied Tuesday to catch up to gains logged in Hong Kong while the mainland was closed for Golden Week, A-shares “needed” to fall Wednesday to catch down to H-shares’ disastrous Tuesday showing. But do note: Hong Kong-traded Chinese shares fell on Wednesday too.

Whether Finance Minister Lan can clean up this burgeoning mess is debatable. Chinese investors are notoriously emotional, and a lot of the money that went into H-shares in recent weeks was speculative — that hot money will hit the exits at the first sign of trouble, which in this case means if Beijing doesn’t deliver the fiscal goods.

Ostensibly anyway, the finance minister is the guy you want to hear from. After all, the finance ministry’s in charge of… well, finances, and the rally’s predicated in no small part on expectations for big, debt-funded fiscal outlays. Lan will need to detail at least CNY2 trillion of such spending to placate investors, and probably more like CNY3 trillion.

Last week, a top economist’s suggestion that Beijing could, over time, issue as much as CNY10 trillion in debt to fund stimulus — and the same economist’s remarks about countenancing a wider deficit in a bid to shore up growth — arguably set the bar even higher than it was already set in the fanciful minds of investors.

It still feels like authorities in Beijing are hoping the PBoC can do most of the heavy lifting. They know better. The post-GFC experience in the West plainly suggests that relying on monetary policy to sustain an economic recovery without sufficient help on the fiscal side is a recipe for sluggish growth, disinflation and the very kinds of asset bubbles Chinese officials want to avoid.

The PBoC apparently held a joint meeting with the MoF on Wednesday. According to media reports, a lot of that discussion centered around the central bank’s bond-trading — so, technical matters around the PBoC’s recent efforts to curb one-way bets on lower yields. But I’m sure “other matters” came up.

As for Lan’s presser, I suppose there are any number of reasons the Party scheduled it for Saturday, but it’s possible Beijing wanted to hold the event on a day the market wasn’t open in order to give hysterical investors a day to process whatever the MoF announces before trading it.

In any case, this is typical of China: Gross economic mismanagement and bumbling attempts to manipulate the stock market. The government’s incompetent, and the only thing more incurable than a penchant for oppression is a penchant for stupidity. At least the latter’s funny.