Category Archives: China

Are We Really Going to Sell Out the US Alliance for Property Prices? Australia’s China Choices

Australia faces choices in deciding what role China should play in Australia’s future. China is aggressively deploying “soft power” and outright offers of money (or threats to withhold funds) in attempting to sway Australian foreign policy both in the short-term, in pressing China’s case for control of the South China Sea, and in the longer-term, to reconsider its alliance with the United States.

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Rebalancing, Wealth Transfers, and the Growth of Chinese Debt

By Michael Pettis, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. Cross posted from China Financial Markets. For the past ten years much of what I have written about debt in China was aimed mainly at trying to convince analysts and policymakers […]

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Michael Pettis: China – How Much Investment is Optimal?

If China’s very low level of social capital has long ago made its investment strategy obsolete, that suggests that China has overinvested beyond its capacity to utilize these investments economically. Thus there are hidden losses on bank balance sheets created by the failure to write down physical capital to its true value. In this case Chinese growth cannot help but drop significantly as these losses are finally recognized and as investment levels are sharply curtailed.

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