1/5

One quibble. In spite of having terrible debt dynamics, I've always thought that China was unlikely to have a financial crisis because financial crises are caused by the sudden unravelling of balance-sheet mismatches. In China’s closed banking...

scmp.com/economy/china-…
2/5
system, liabilities are easily restructured by the authorities, and so mismatches on paper are not mismatches in reality. But too many economists – who really should know better – simply assume that “excessive” debt matters only to the extent that it might lead to crisis.
3/5

This is not just wrong, it is circular. In fact both finance theory and most of the historical evidence suggests that over the medium and long term, countries with excessively-high debt levels that don’t suffer financial crises often sharply underperform those that do.
4/5

It is the debt itself that is the problem, in other words, and not just the financial crisis the debt might cause. I’d argue that financial crises are probably worse mainly for countries with fragile social and political institutions, but being able to avoid...
5/5

a financial crisis does not mean avoiding the ultimate economic costs of resolving the debt problem, which include financial distress costs and the costs of writing down what Galbraith used to refer to as the “bezzle”.

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More from @michaelxpettis

11 Feb
1/4

Interesting article. "Of the 20 most commonly used apps in China — ranging from photo editing to file sharing, from maps to streaming platforms — all have some kind of in-app loan services."

Nearly every modern bubble economy was characterized...

protocol.com/china/chinese-…
2/4

in part by an explosion in new – and so unregulated – forms of lending. Beijing is trying to regulate this app-based from of micro-lending, but this only helps if the new forms of lending are unnecessary froth on the structure of the economy and so can be suppressed.
3/4

The problem, I would argue, is that in retrospect it usually, or even always, turns out that the structure of the bubble economy had evolved to the point where the rapid extension of credit was fundamental to its growth. If that is the case in China (and I think...
Read 4 tweets
9 Feb
1/6

Chinese bank loans were up RMB 3.58 trillion in January, and total social financing was up RMB 5.17 trillion, both exceeding expectations, but because the growth in TSF seems to be slowing down, some analysts may be misinterpreting the implications.

scmp.com/economy/china-…
2/6

Major changes in the base means you must be very careful about how you compare growth rates over time, and analysts and journalists must watch the real arithmetic of China’s debt burden. While it is true that January’s TSF growth rate was lower month-on-month in 2021 than...
3/6

it was in 2020 (1.8% versus 2.0%), this occurred on a much higher base, which necessarily undermines the comparability of these two numbers. It turns out that while the growth rate of debt decelerated, the growth in the debt burden actually accelerated.
Read 6 tweets
9 Feb
1/4

The PBoC continues to try to limit credit growth in China, in this case household debt, arguing that “there is very little room for further expansion of household debt”. It warns that the household debt ratio nearly doubled, to 62% of...

caixinglobal.com/2021-02-09/cen…
2/4

GDP, or RMB 63 trillion, between the end of 2011 and the end of 2020.

The problem is that household debt is just one locus of debt-creation needed to keep GDP growth rates high enough to satisfy political needs. If the PBoC were to restrain growth in household debt, then...
3/4

either there must be a countervailing increase in corporate and government debt, or Beijing must accept lower GDP growth rates.

This is the problem with a "technocratic" approach that identifies individual problems and seeks to address them independently of their...
Read 4 tweets
7 Feb
1/4

The US bilateral deficit with China is down 10% since 2016, and down 26% since 2018, when the trade conflict began. This might suggest to some that Trump’s trade policies were “successful” in addressing the US trade imbalance, but in fact during...

scmp.com/news/china/art…
2/4

this time the overall American trade deficit with the world soared, as did China’s overall trade surplus.

This isn’t just an unfortunate coincidence. In a highly globalized world in which frictional costs on trade and capital flows are almost zero, bilateral imbalances...
3/4

tell us almost nothing about the sources of trade imbalances, which is why country-specific trade measures have almost no real impact beyond shifting the imbalances around. As long as...

carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…
Read 4 tweets
5 Feb
1/8

Good article, although I think the argument as to whether or not GDP is a good measure of economic performance largely misses the point. Of course it isn't, but no measure can be. GDP is a proxy for certain kinds of economic activity, and not only...

ft.com/content/647345…
2/8

do we not know or agree what economic activity to include in our measure, but we're not even sure how to measure whatever we decide to include.

But as any mathematician can tell you, that doesn't make the GDP measure worthless. It can still be used comparably as long as...
3/8

the relationship between the GDP measure and whatever it is we "really" want to measure is unbiased and consistent. Last year's US GDP, for example, doesn't meaningfully measure the total value of goods and services produced last year in the...
Read 8 tweets
4 Feb
1/5

For over 15 years Chinese regulators have implemented one reform after another aimed at taming the wildly speculative Chinese stock markets in an attempt to make them converge with more sophisticated markets in the US and Europe. I have long...

ft.com/content/b6a975…
2/5

argued that because these reforms never really addressed the structural problems in the stock markets – mainly poor-quality macro data, false financial statements, a terribly opaque corporate governance framework, suppressed interest rates, unpredictable and...
3/5

ever-changing rules of the game, political vendettas, insider activity, and other features that made it impossible for fundamental investors to project and value cashflows except at very high discount rates – none of these reforms would make a...

carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancial…
Read 5 tweets

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