A lot of people have asked me to write about the recently “leaked” CBRC report on dodgy local government debt. Here is what the article in Monday’s Bloomberg had to say about it (and note especially that delicious second paragraph): Mainland banks may struggle to recoup about 23 per cent of the 7.7 trillion yuan …
Read More…Archive for July, 2010
Do sovereign debt ratios matter?
In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble. The most common question is whether or not there is a threshold of debt (measured, say, against total GDP) above which …
Read More…The capital tsunami is a bigger threat than the nuclear option
Since this is another long posting, it might make sense to summarize briefly its two parts. In the first part, expanding on an OpEd piece of mine published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, I argue that China’s “nuclear option”, which has generated a great deal of nervousness among investors and policy-making circles in …
Read More…What do banking crises have to do with consumption?
Just three days after returning to Beijing from New York, I had to leave again, this time to a series of conferences in Torino, Italy, so it is hard to do much writing for my blog, especially since I won’t spend my free time in the hotel when there is so damned much food out …
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