European nationalists have successfully convinced us, against all logic, that the European crisis is a conflict among nations, and not among economic sectors. Today’s Financial Times has an articlediscussing the travails of Greece’s new Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis as he takes on Germany: ......
Monetary policy is as much about politics as it is economics. It affects the ways in which wealth is created, allocated, and retained and it determines the balance of power between providers of capital and users of capital. In January one of my readers kindly passed on to me a link to an interesting reportpublis......
On Tuesday the National Bureau of Statistics released China’s 2014 GDP growth numbers and reported growth consistent with what the government has been widely promoting as the “new normal”. According to the preliminary estimation, the gross domestic product (GDP) of China was 63,646.3 billion yuan in 2......
The National Bureau of Statistics released today CPI and PPI data for December 2014. People’s Dailysummarizes the CPI data, which came in pretty close to market expectations: China’s consumer prices grew 2 percent in 2014 from one year earlier, well below the government’s 3.5 percent target set for th......
The Financial Times ran a very interesting article last week called “China: Turning away from the dollar”. It got a lot of attention, at least among China analysts, and I was asked several times by friends and clients for my response. The authors, James Kynge and Josh Noble, begin their article ......
By Michael Pettis · October 30, 2014 Reuters had an article yesterday about the rumors, and I too have heard about this over the past couple of months, that Beijing will raise subway prices. This topic is pretty specific and specialized compared to what I normally write abou......
佩蒂斯:中国非世界经济引擎 十年后增速不超3%-4% 【Christina/编译】近日,卡内基国际和平基金会高级研究员迈克尔·佩蒂斯撰文指出,中国并非世界经济引擎,中国增速放缓对全球经济的影响被高估,中国增速放缓将对只一些地区产生影响,影响可能有好有坏,具体是好是坏取决于中国如何调节国内储蓄和投资,如果储蓄下降的速度快于投资,将给世......
From the early 1980s until now China has grown at a pace not matched since the four decades Argentina enjoyed before the First World War. In spite of some fairly goofy attempts a few years ago, however, to characterize China during this period as having followed a set of policies called the “Beijing Consensus”, the......
It might seem almost churlish to wonder what would happen if Spain were to leave the euro. The official European position is that the battle of the euro has been pretty much won, and anyone who argues otherwise will be accused of being a euro hater, an Anglo-Saxon or, even worse, a writer for theFinancial Times. B......
Debate about the global savings glut hypothesis is mired in confusion, a fundamental one of which is the seemingly obvious but false claim that a global savings glut must lead to higher global savings.Here, for example, is a recent piece by one of my favorite economists, Barry Eichengreen: There is only one proble......
中国离世界第一很远 原因在坏账 最近世界银行一份报告宣称中国有望在今年超越美国成为全球最大经济体,引起广泛争议。世行报告通过购买力平价(PPP)对中美GDP进行调整,以纠正汇率在反映产品和服务实际成本上的缺陷。按汇率计算,2011年中国GDP规模为美国的47%;但是经过PPP调整之后,相当于美国的87%。世行进一步推算中国经济规模将在今年超越......
A lot of things have happened in China since my last entry – in the FX markets, in the banking system, in the announcements of default, and in the continuing lowering of growth expectations – but for all the turmoil, as I see it nothing has happened that was unexpected and that has not been discussed many times on ......
I don’t often make reference to these kinds of things in my blog, but Saturday’s terrorist attack in the Kunming train station – in which 29 innocent people were hacked to death (the toll was especially high among the elderly who were unable to run away quickly enough from the killers) – fills me with dread and d......
Tom Holland had an interesting piece in the South China Morning Post three weeks ago in which he discusses the low valuations of Chinese banks. About a decade ago, if I remember correctly, Chinese banks were trading between three and four times book. Those valuations have dropped considerably since then: On Monday......
I got a lot of feedback from my January 5 blog entry because of my argument that the implementation of the reforms proposed in the Third Plenum all but guarantees that growth rates in China will slow down. For that reason I thought it might make sense for me to explain a little more carefully why I think this must ha......
【中文导读】 ——在这个十年剩下的几年间,要让中国GDP增长速度仍然维持或接近目前的水平几乎是不可能的。也许当增长水平下降时,那些声称目前增速将保持下去的人或把原因归咎于北京当局没能好好执行改革任务。这样或许能帮他们扳回颜面,但我认为,这种看法错得相当离谱。相反,要是中国GDP在2014和2015年继续以每年高于7%的速度增长,那恰恰说明,北京......
Following Paul Krugman’s lead I guess I can refer to this post as being “wonkish”. Much of it is based on my recent book Avoiding the Fall (Carnegie Endowment, September 2013). In order to understand much of what is happening in China I believe it is crucially important to understand how financial systems opera......
The past two years have seen a surprising amount of turmoil at the highest levels of the Chinese political establishment. We have seen political alliances re-shuffled, powerful business and political leaders arrested, factional disputes magnified, and an explosion of rumors of more to come. After twenty years of what......
Last month’s award of the Nobel Price in economics set off a great deal of chortling because one of the three recipients, Eugene Fama, received the award for saying that markets are efficient at capital allocation and another, Robert Schiller, received the award for saying they are not. Typical is this response by J......
It seems to me that one of the automatic, if not always intended, consequences of Abenomics is to force up Japan’s current account surplus, and in fact to force it up substantially. This will have to do at least in part with deciding how to manage the country’s enormous government debt burden, which easily exceeds ......