Aug 27th, 2010
On August 8 Credit Suisse published a study they had commissioned by Professor Wang Xiaolu of the China Reform Foundation. A lot of readers have asked on- and offline me to discuss this study in light of the entry I posted two weeks ago about Chinese consumption – and especially to explain whether this study [...]
Aug 10th, 2010
There has been a lot of excited press commentary recently about China’s overtaking Japan as the world’s second largest economy. China’s GDP should be larger than Japan’s for the first time sometime this year, which in a similar context in 1987 the Italians called “il sorpasso”. For all the excited search for the deeper meaning [...]
Jul 4th, 2010
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 [...]
Apr 6th, 2010
Since this is a very long post, it may make sense first to provide a quick summary of what I am going to argue. As I have discussed often in earlier posts, pessimists are starting to worry about excessive debt levels in China, about which they are very right to worry, and many are predicting [...]
There seems to be a thaw in the currency war. President Obama and President Hu had a long telephone conversation today and my guess is that the Treasury will hold off on naming China a currency manipulator in two weeks. I hate to be a pessimist, but this might be very temporary. Unless the US [...]
Mar 26th, 2010
Correction: Two days after I posted the entry below I received a rather testy email from John Frisbie. In the USCBC statement to which I was referring he claimed that the EPI report was “built on the faulty assumption that every product imported from China would have been made in the US otherwise.” I foolishly [...]
The Chinese new year has only just started, and already trade tensions are ratcheting up. This is perhaps appropriate — astrologers tell us that the year of the Tiger is often a year of instability and conflict — and I suspect things will almost certainly get worse. The timing of various domestic political events in [...]
Feb 14th, 2010
I got back three days ago from my trip to the US and am still sludging through my jet-lag, but there are two quick takeaways from the trip I should mention. First, my Washington meetings convinced me (no big surprise here) that, just as it is doing in Europe, the issue of trade is getting [...]
Dec 13th, 2009
The Christmas season, upcoming exams, student job hunting, and lots of visitors have made this a tough time to keep track of things but, before I go on to discuss the reason for the title of this entry, I wanted to make a quick comment on the economic numbers that came out last week. As [...]
Dec 5th, 2009
How fast does consumption need to grow in China in order for a meaningful rebalancing to take place? Probably a lot more than you think. This is arithmetically the case because China is starting from such a low base. At roughly $1.2 trillion in 2008, total Chinese private consumption is only a little more than [...]