Posted on 12/13/2006 1:44:39 AM PST by bruinbirdman
If you are not keeping a close eye on the Chinese banking system, perhaps you should be. Bill McDonough, the ex-chief of New York Federal Reserve, let slip at a conference in Italy this week that China's rickety credit structure was the biggest single menace to the world economy.
It was Mr McDonough, now an adviser to Lehman Brothers, who rescued the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management after it made an $80bn bad bet on Danish, Swedish and south European bonds in August 1998.
He orchestrated three rate cuts, admitting afterwards that some $1,300bn in derivatives had threatened to topple like dominoes and "freeze" the global system. The trigger for this crisis was the Russian default, but the deeper roots lay in Asia's banks.
Mr McDonough did not spell out his current fears about China, except to say that it was the issue "on everybody's minds". I must confess that it was not on my mind. It is now.
Beijing admits that the banks are the "soft underbelly" of its booming economy, but says the system has been cleaned up after an estimated $400bn in bail-outs since 1998. Critics reply that fresh money has been wasted by Communist bosses meting out credit for political ends, digging the country into a deeper hole.
Investment is running at 43pc of GDP, leaving an oversupply of factories and office blocks, like Japan in the 1980s, but with even less market discipline. Ernst & Young calculated the bad debts at more than $900bn in a report this year but was forced to recant by Beijing.
Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, said the regime had embarked on a suicidal course, living from one day to the next from fear that 140m footloose urban migrants could turn violent.
"China is just piling up more and more non-performing loans, and eventually it's going to come crashing down, because economically this doesn't make any sense," he said. "You can't blow up your balance sheet at 20pc to 25pc a year with a well-managed bank in a well-regulated society. How the devil can you do it in China? This is just ludicrous," he said.
Charles Calomiris, finance professor at New York's Columbia University, warns in the journal Central Banking that Beijing cannot change course because it faces "political revolution" if it cuts off the flow of credit.
"Bad loans are not some little problem a good regulator can take care of; they are part of the whole way the system functions. Looking into the crystal ball, there will be a crisis in the financial sector in China in 2009-2010," he said. Some say sooner.
It is a fear shared by experts on the ground, if not by foreign banks now buying "pay-to-play" blocs of the Big Four state behemoths. The prospectuses of these Chinese banks are a "comedy show", says Kent McCarthy from the hedge fund Jayhawk Capital.
Above all, the fears are shared by US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who embarks on a star-studded trip to Beijing this week to prevent US-China relations ending in a smash-up.
Mr Paulson is a "friend of China", but he learned where the dead bodies are buried during 70 trips to the country for Goldman Sachs. Those visits were spent sorting out bad loans, which accounts for his jaundiced view of the Chinese miracle.
In a recent speech, he warned against the fallacy of extrapolating "meteoric growth" forever, "as if China has somehow found a way to immunise itself from business cycles".
Shifting peasants from state farms to state factories was the easy part of China's great leap forward. From now on it gets harder. "The tasks faced by Beijing are so daunting that the biggest risk we face is not that China will overtake the US, but that China won't move ahead with the reforms necessary to sustain its growth," he said.
Mr Paulson's brief from the Smoot-Hawley protectionists on Capitol Hill is to scream so loudly at the Chinese over their $168bn trade surplus that they bend to demands for a stronger yuan.
He knows this is the surest path to financial crisis for both countries: for America because China's central bank now holds more than $700bn in US bonds and dollar instruments, including $342bn in US Treasuries. China is now global lender of last resort.
Obviously, China would hurt itself if it set off a run on the dollar and triggered a US recession by pushing up long-term US interest rates. But good sense goes out of the window once tempers fly.
Less understood is that a sharp rise in the yuan could be the last straw for China's banks, sitting on a network of loss-making factories living off marginal exports. Standard & Poor's said a 25pc rise in the yuan combined with a 2pc rise in interest rates would slash corporate profits by a third.
An article in Washington's journal International Economy – which had White House fingerprints all over it – said Mr Paulson's fear is that a "significant Chinese recession" that would spill over into the rest of the world.
In the end, China's bubbling energy and mass of people will likely send it vaulting up the economic league. Much like America's stunning emergence in the 1920s – another tale of over-investment and bank abuse. That is a parallel that should give pause for thought.
I hope it doesn't, but... a few months ago I heard the host of a radio travel show describe his last trip to China. He took a domestic flight into some city I've never heard of, that apparently has several million people. The brand new airport has about thirty gates, but only enough traffic to use four or five. The other twenty five gates just sit there, gathering dust
The host said the whole industrialized part of the country is like that. The host spent ten minutes raving about how far sighted the Chinese are, to build infrastructure far in excess of their current needs. To me it sounded like the worst speculative over building I've ever seen, magnified, and nation wide.
Yep, all the classic signs of boom-bust. And when it busts, it ain't gonna be pretty.
You made a statement, "they cannot really invest in your economy" and then another, "but can they cannot invest these dollars in american core business".
It took me 5 seconds to prove you were wrong. So what was your point again?
now your taking the piss...
Is that some kind of kinky German thing? Don't invade anyone, please :^)
Are you drunk ?
Certainly, look at what our central bank did in 1999/2000, or what Japan's central bank did in 1989/1990. They never seem to learn.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=taking+the+piss
- strong in math - bad in english ?
Are you stupid?
Yes, I'm strong in math. Just because I wasn't familiar with that slang doesn't mean I'm bad in English.
No, I wasn't joking when I asked you not to invade anyone.
Yes I am - wasting my time with you. But not so stupid to move to insults the moment my intellectual reach is overstretched.
That would be telling everyone that it's probably not worth listening to my words.
So now that I proved you were wrong you're surrendering? I thought you were German, not French?
and we continue to hook our economic wagon to the global horse why?
I must admit that I don't understand global economies
But I'm also not dumb enough to believe that doing this without a solid local economy behind us is an intelligent thing to do.
I know but I think it's a good deal for us that you win.
I know it's important to you to win. Americans love to win.
Germans consider what the price is ;-)
Just because we're good at it and you're.......not.
Yes you can invest in core business. You can come here and start a corporation. If you want to borrow money, the government will GIVE it to you to start a business (they also like to take part of your profits, but that's not news. Sounds pretty fair, no?)
Seriously, I am not sure if "foreigners" can buy stock directly, but land ownership is not prohibited.
Sorry - that's not what I mean - venture capital is surely one of the things I admire in the US economy - you guys have experts for that - our bankers are a bit trashy - one day they burn cash like mad, next day the inventor of the perpetuum mobile would be send home because they wouldn't see a market for that product.
What I was referring to is, that the chineese are unable to buy for example pfizer or united technologies for their huge ammount of dollar debts they hold.
So the chineese get dollars but certainly not the freedom to go shopping for what they desire.
Life is so unfair sometimes.
Noone said that it would be wise to let them buy raytheon - smartboy.
It's just that they might consider dropping a worthless swimmingpool full of green printed fish wrap into the south chineese sea or just swamp some commodity markets with it, spoiling every price. (ooops, that's what they do allready)
because that's what dollars are if you cannot buy anything meaningful with them - go ahead make some proposal what they could do with their 1 trillion bucks !
The moment they stop buying fish wraps, they cannot export to you anymore - so they will stop the moment when they have alternatives.
So - aslong as there aren't any better consumers then you guys - you are safe. But if your subprime business does implode which it does as we type here - this might affect your consume happyness.
It is just not important that they would be in the shit some deaper than you - get your head around this - it's not about winning.
Like you just said, they can buy commodities with dollars. You can buy commodities with your Euros. Isn't freedom great?
The moment they stop buying fish wraps, they cannot export to you anymore
Yes. Is that supposed to be some profound observation on your part?
So - aslong as there aren't any better consumers then you guys - you are safe.
We were in danger? How do you figure?
It is just not important that they would be in the shit some deaper than you
How are you confusing our situation (+3% GDP growth and 4.5% unemployment) with being in deep shit?
"An article in Washington's journal International Economy – which had White House fingerprints all over it – said Mr Paulson's fear is that a "significant Chinese recession" that would spill over into the rest of the world."
Is this what Greenspan had in mind when he warned, about two weeks ago, of eminent recession?
yitbos
well 'deep shit' is not what you are in - I just wouldn't bet on the superpower status for the next 10 years.
It's the US who have to freeze projects like the F-35, DDX and so on - and the only thing discussed in WSJ and FT are wether you 're about to experience a soft landing or a crash.
While I read today in FAZ that china is about to found an investment organisation for their trillion $ problem (a copycat version of the one in singapore) - they promised to invest slowly to not tilt the dollar.
And they decided to have a carrier fleet.
(Certainly I know that the asumed-dead often live longer)
I just don't suffer from nationalistic induced halucinations - certainly I do know the europe will go the way of the US because it's still like always - you cough means we get a cold.
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