1/10

The latest IMF report on China was released yesterday and provides a lot of good information and intelligent insight on the Chinese economy. The IMF’s measure of China’s adjusted fiscal deficit (including estimated off-budget investment...

imf.org/en/Publication…
2/10

spending) is projected to rise to 18.2% of GDP in 2020 from 12.6% in 2019. The authors correctly note the worrying surge in debt and warn that Beijing must continue to try to contain financial stability risks, but I notice that they are projecting average GDP...
3/10

growth of just over 6% between 2012 and 2025, including a downward revision of their 2021 forecast from 8.2% to 7.9% (which I still think is a little high).

As I’ve long argued, it will be impossible for China both to control the surge in debt and to achieve growth...
4/10

targets above the real underlying growth rate of the economy, which I suspect is 2-3% at best. I know the IMF is constrained in what it is able to say about the Chinese economy if it wants to remain part of the advisory process, but I do think that after 10 years...
5/10

of watching this game we should be a lot more explicit about the relationship between unreasonably high GDP growth targets and high credit growth. There really is no point in advising Beijing to get financial risks under control while at the same time approving...
6/10

GDP growth targets that cannot but result in out-of-control increase in debt. The former requires the latter: if China grows by an average of 6% over the next five years, total social financing will rise from roughly 280% of GDP today to at least 320-40% of GDP.
7/10

The IMF also recommends that China do more to rebalance domestic demand towards consumption, which Beijing has been saying it would do since at least 2007. To do so it proposes expanding unemployment benefits, increasing transfers to low income households, enhancing...
8/10

public healthcare and otherwise strengthening the social safety net. This all makes sense, of course, but it is only half the story. Transfers involve not just “transfers to” but also “transfers from”. If Beijing permits these transfers to be funded by local government...
9/10

borrowing, as they always have been, it cannot resolve the underlying problem. Higher consumption only comes at the expense, in that case, of more local-government debt, and the whole point of rebalancing is to get Chinese growth to depend less on debt. I understand...
10/10

that this is an intensely political problem and very hard to resolve, which is perhaps why the IMF is staying clear of it, but the key to rebalancing demand, just as the key to resolving debt, is how to allocate the costs. The benefits are obvious.

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More from @michaelxpettis

11 Jan
1/4

China's CPI inflation was 0.2% for the past 12 months, substantially higher than the -0.5% registered in November but lower than the roughly 2% of the past five years. I believe demand deposits yield 0.35% and 1-year and 2-year deposits yield 1.5%...

xinhuanet.com/english/2021-0…
2/4

and 2.1%, which means that for now households are getting a real return on their savings, but they won't be if CPI prices continue to rise as fast as they have in the past several weeks. The real return on savings matters a lot to the distribution of income and to the...
3/4

share households retain of GDP, which in turn matters to rebalancing.

On the other hand PPI prices are still in year-on-year deflation. PPI prices declined by 0.4% in December, about half of what was expected, compared to a 1.5% decline year on year in November.
Read 4 tweets
9 Jan
1/6

I hope Joe Biden and his administration are serious about this stimulus spending, especially if it is directed to much-needed infrastructure. For those who are worried about where the money needed to fund the spending will "come from", the fact is...

ft.com/content/b69a5d…
2/6

that any investment or disbursement that results in unemployed people having productive jobs is ultimately self-liquidating because the increase in the total value of goods and services produced by the economy will exceed the increase in the debt.

carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…
3/6

There can of course be problems with inefficient spending and "unfair" transfers, but these are really political issues that can be addressed through the tax system, not economic issues. The point is that if there are Americans who want to work but cannot find...
Read 6 tweets
7 Jan
1/5

I disagree. I don't think American democracy was trashed. It was certainly bruised, but democracy is a messy process, and it is especially messy during times when political institutions must adjust to great underlying changes. But that is also its great strength: however...
2/5

messily they do so, democracies adjust.

One thing we can say about recent events in Washington is that they should make the urgency of adjustment all the more clear to Republican and Democrat policymakers. The direction should also be pretty clear. Throughout American...
3/5

history a long period of soaring wealth for the elite and economic stagnation for the masses has always led first to deep resentment, and then to political chaos and conflict which at times even seemed a challenge to democracy, but always ended up strengthening it.
Read 5 tweets
7 Jan
1/5

Five provincial government have raised RMB 51 billion in the past month to recapitalize 29 banks and rural credit cooperatives. We are going to see a lot more of this in 2021 as the regulators try to repair a very insolvent banking system, but it...

caixinglobal.com/2021-01-07/pro…
2/5

is important to understand that this does not "resolve" the problem so much as shift it onto the balance sheets of local and provincial governments, which at some point will also have to be repaired. Already something like 60% of their debt-servicing costs cannot be...
3/5

repaid out of an increase in real economic capacity and so must be rolled over.

This is an old story. Every time the regulators resolve excess debt in one sector of the economy, they do so by exacerbating excess debt in another. This is inevitable given the country's...
Read 5 tweets
7 Jan
1/5

This article says that online education companies have invested $15 billion last year, but only had revenue of a few billion dollars and no profits. They cite an analyst as saying "If you don’t raise money when everyone else is, you’ll fall behind".

caixinglobal.com/2021-01-07/in-…
2/5

I think we've seen this movie before. Three years ago one of my former students told me he was leaving a very successful career in PE to start an online education company. There were so many PE firms in China trying to invest so much money, he told me, that there was a...
3/5

shortage of good companies to buy, and any company with a good Powerpoint presentation could raise huge amounts of PE money. It was better to sell companies than buy them, he concluded, and suggested that online learning would be a very hot business for PE financing.
Read 5 tweets
7 Jan
@ZichenWanghere @ruima 1/

I totally agree. Financial repression in China constrains the growth in household income and so forces up the domestic savings rate. In the 1990s, when China was hugely underinvested, higher savings and low interest rates resulted in massive amounts of productive...
@ZichenWanghere @ruima 2/

investment, and this investment powered rapid increases in the wealth-generating capacity of the Chinese economy.

At some point in the early 2000s, however, when China had closed the gap between its actual and optimal investment levels, much of the new investment was...
@ZichenWanghere @ruima 3/

allocated into non-productive projects. Because demand was so unbalanced and consumption so low, China had no choice but to keep investment levels high if it wanted growth in economic activity also to remain high. During the first decade financial repression actually...
Read 5 tweets

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