…So if anyone wants to continue to be very bullish about Chinese growth prospects over the next decade, it seems to me that he must address and answer these three questions:MacroBusiness
1. How much debt is there whose real cost exceeds the economic value created by the debt, which sector of the economy will pay for the excess, and what is the mechanism that will ensure the necessary wealth transfer?
2. What projects can we identify that will allow hundreds of billions of dollars, or even trillions of dollars, of investment whose wealth creation in the short and medium term will exceed the real cost of the debt, and what is the mechanism for ensuring that these investments will get made?
3. What mechanism can be implemented to increase the growth rate of household consumption?
Pettis: How to be a China bull
Posted by Houses and Holes in China Economy
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"3. What mechanism can be implemented to increase the growth rate of household consumption?">
ReplyDeleteProperly targeted deficit spending or massive wealth re-distribution. TINA.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
Questions 1. and 2. don't make a lot of sense to me. Financial wealth can't be multiplied and the valuation of real wealth is tied to spending power.
I suspect that Pettis has more than "neo-liberal tendencies." It makes me smile a bit when the likes of a Niall Ferguson tell about how the "problem" with India and China is that their financial system is not so "advanced" as ours in the West and how the government being involved "holds them back." Pettis is always going on about "financial repression" by which I think he means savers are harmed by low interest rates. Isn't that the situation worldwide? In the financial crisis of the West, the "hard landing" seems to have occured because the governments chose to bail out the insolvent institutions while leaving the individual debtor dangling "on the hook." Pettis may be right that China is due for a sea change in its economy, but whether they have a hard or soft landing won't be entirely left to the tender mercies of an all powerful financial sector as ours was.
ReplyDelete"savers are harmed by low interest rates."
ReplyDeleteThat's probably a good thing…saving is destructive to an economy if the leakages arent offset by new money creation (nfa's for the anal-retentive types).
Pettis is always good for facts and insight into China but he is firmly embedded in the mainstream governmental budget constraint framework so he gets his bull and bear wires crossed.
ReplyDelete"It is obvious that spending growth is needed to restore overall economic growth in Europe and elsewhere. So the debate is about where that spending growth will come from.
ReplyDeleteAt last count there were two broad macroeconomic sectors – the government and the non-government. The non-government sector can be decomposed into the private domestic sector and the external sector. The private domestic sector can be further decomposed into households who consume and firms who invest (in productive capital).
Macroeconomics is easy. There are two broad spending sectors and then some more detail." - Bill Mitchell
The Celtic poster child demonstrates the failure of austerity
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=21073
This is the kind of simple and direct explanation that is near and dear to my heart. Too bad it's embedded in a monstrous post like a needle in a haystack.
Another concept near and dear:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/we-are-96-percent-13098331?src=rss
"Step One: Correctly Identify the Problem....
…
Step Two: Propose the Logical Solution....
…
@ paul
ReplyDeleteStep One: Correctly Identify the Problem....
Step Two: Kill the monsters under the bed and the bogeymen in the closet....
Step Three: Propose the Logical Solution....