China

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…

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph had an interesting post out yesterday on demographic trends in China. He writes that the working-age population in China is now shrinking as China ages quickly, in part due to the one-child policy.…

In China, I have argued many times, high growth is no longer compatible with a strengthening balance sheet. If China is growing at a rate that approaches or exceeds five or six percent, it is probably a safe bet that debt is rising faster…

Last year, I started my weekly newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give you a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occuring that I believed had a fifty percent or better chance of…

According to the Financial Times, the Australian mining group Fortescue has moved into expansion mode on the back of robust iron-ore prices that are now at an eight-month high. The reason for the rebound is the reflation efforts of the…

By Michael Pettis The big news in the past two weeks has been the slew of economic data suggesting that China has firmly turned the corner on its economic closedown. Growth is up, investment is up, and inflation is down. Here, for example,…

 If you look at the recent economic data coming out of China, it is clear the economy is in a bottoming process. The question is whether the measures used to keep the economy from sliding further are sustainable. The most recent piece of…

By Michael Pettis In the past two weeks we have been treated with a mostly positive but nonetheless mixed bag of economic data from China. There has been good news, bad news, good news with worrying underlying trends, and bad news with…

By Michael Pettis Chiwoong Lee at Goldman Sachs has a new report out (“China vs. 1970s Japan”, September 25, 2012) in which he predicts that China’s long-term growth rate will drop to 7.5-8.5%. I disagree very strongly with his forecast,…

The following is the text of a speech Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered at a high-level seminar sponsored by the International Monetary Fund on Sunday. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. This morning I will first…