I have often written in this blog and elsewhere about the three policy choices Beijing faces as it tries to manage through the adjustment process. My argument is that subject to two very plausible assumptions, every economic policy Beijing implements ultimately can be abstracted to one choice among three options. These two assumptions are: China […]
Read More…Category: Rebalancing
The impact in China and abroad of slowing growth
This blog entry is largely something I wrote a year ago about the impact of a Chinese rebalancing on the global economy, rx and except for this first paragraph nothing has been changed. The entry on my blog that had been posted a couple of weeks earlier was an attempt to explain why it is […]
Read More…Does it matter if China cleans up its banks?
I’ve always thought that Shirley Yam of the South China Morning Post has a great nose for financial risk, and this shows in an article she published last week on mainland real estate. For anyone knowledgeable about the history of financial bubbles and crises, much of the following story will seem extremely familiar. The point […]
Read More…Rebalancing, wealth transfers, and the growth of Chinese debt
For the past ten years much of what I have written about debt in China was aimed mainly at trying to convince analysts and policymakers that the Chinese economy was structurally dependent on an unsustainable increase in debt in order to generate GDP growth rates above some level. This level might have been around 5-6% […]
Read More…Will China’s new “supply-side” reforms help China?
It wasn’t enough that we started 2016 with one of the worst weeks in the recent history of Chinese and global markets, but the panic continued into the following weeks and wreaked a great deal of damage to confidence. A lot of the reflexive China bulls are cautioning against misinterpreting the implications of the stock […]
Read More…China’s rebalancing timetable
We often read in the press rather alarming stories about the rise of an ugly and belligerent nationalism in China, buy cialis but while these stories are certainly very real, sovaldi after the November 13 bombings in Paris I was struck by a very different kind of Chinese behavior. A lot of young people that […]
Read More…If we don’t understand both sides of China’s balance sheet, we understand neither
With so much happening in China in the past month it seems that there are a number of very specific topics that any essay on China should focus. I worry, however, that we get so caught up staring at strange clumps of trees that we risk losing sight of the forest. What happened in July […]
Read More…What multiple should we give China’s GDP growth?
Last week Derek Scissors, a think tank analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, published an article in which he referred to an October, 2014, study by Credit Suisse that attempts to measure total household wealth by region and by country. Scissors argues that in the interminable debate about whether or not China will overtake the […]
Read More…China, Europe, and optimal currency zones
I typically think of four main factors that determine whether or not an economy can function efficiently as a single currency or economic zone. They primarily determine the level of adjustments costs and how these costs are to be shared, so that regions more able to bear the costs absorb a larger share of those […]
Read More…What does a “good” Chinese adjustment look like?
I have always thought that the soft landing/hard landing debate wholly misses the point when it comes to China’s economic prospects. It confuses the kinds of market-based adjustments we are likely to see in the US or Europe with the much more controlled process we see in China. Instead of a hard landing or a […]
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