Wednesday, July 16, 2014

China's looming bad debt crisis

Something to keep an eye on. From Michael Pettis:

[...] we cannot simply put the bad debt behind us once the economy is “reformed” and project growth as if nothing happened. Earlier losses are still unrecognized and hidden in the country’s various balance sheets. These losses will either be explicitly recognized or they will be implicitly amortized. The only interesting question, as I see it, is which sector will effectively be assigned the losses. This is a political question above all, and its answer will tell us a great deal about how the newly-constituted, “reformed” China will grow over the next few decades.

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