As regular readers know I have often argued that the Chinese development model is an old one, and can trace its roots at least as far back as the “American System” of the 1820s and 1830s. This “system” was itself based primarily on the works of the brilliant first US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander …
Read More…Category: Uncategorized
What I’ll be watching in 2013
I’ll be watching a number of things in 2013 in order to get a better sense of what the future will bring. On January 22 Princeton University Press will be publishing my book, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead, and in the last chapter of the book I argue that the great trade, …
Read More…Can China increase export competitiveness?
Three weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published my OpEd piece about concern that China may try to make the rebalancing process less painful by allowing the RMB to depreciate. In the piece I argue that this isn’t as obvious as you might think. From July 2005 to February this year the RMB rose by just over 30% …
Read More…Apologies
I apologize to my readers but over the past two weeks my site was infected by a pretty sophisticated virus that made it impossible for me to get into the site, so I was unable to approve comments and to post new entries. Since I also spent much of the past two weeks traveling, it …
Read More…The ways China can rebalance
No matter how sincere its intentions, what Beijing says it will do over the next few years is meaningful only if its policies are both internally consistent and do not violate external constraints. As I proposed two weeks ago, in this post I will try to lay out as logically as possible the economic options …
Read More…The Economist sees (and raises)
The Free Exchange blog at The Economist has accepted my bet, and very cleverly (the bastards!) they have added a second one. For two years I have been arguing that a Chinese rebalancing will require much slower GDP growth rates than we currently think possible and, working backwards from annual consumption growth rates of 7-8%, …
Read More…I would like to make a bet with The Economist
I recently read in The Guardian an article by enthusiastic orientalist Martin Jacques in which he says that The Economist has just predicted that China’s GDP, measured in nominal dollars, will will be the world’s largest by 2018. Earlier estimates, he says had China becoming the largest economy in the world by 2027 I have always been a little skeptical about …
Read More…And…. we’re back…
Welcome back to China Financial Markets. We had trouble with our old host and had to set up a new one. In doing so, however, we lost most of my postings since last August along with the comments. I will be able to set up the posts again, but the comments are probably lost forever, which is …
Read More…No hard landing, but no solution
I have been arguing for a while that as long as the Chinese government retains its capacity to raise debt we are not going to see a sharp slowdown in economic growth – at least until 2013. Any indication that the economy is slowing too quickly will be met with a relaxation of credit controls, …
Read More…China’s lending quota?
This year to everyone’s surprise the PBoC failed to announce 2011’s lending quota. Instead it announced a series of new polices aimed at monitoring the banks. According to an article in Thursday’s People’s Daily: The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, will check credit and capital levels of commercial banks each month …
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