The global economy is full of risks right now. Growth is sluggish and central banks seem powerless to fix it. Europe faces persistent challenges and division. In the US, the presidential election looms.
However, some say the biggest danger of all might be on the other side of the world, in China.
China is in the midst of one of the biggest borrowing binges in recent history. Its debt load reached US$26.6 trillion last year — about five times what it was a decade ago and more than two-and-a-half times the size of the nation’s entire economy. That huge increase has prompted some economists and even prominent investor George Soros to compare China to the US before the 2008 financial crisis.
Illustration: Yusha
How big a danger does China’s fast-growing debt load present to the nation or the world?
The traditional view is that rapidly rising debt eventually leads to an economic crisis. That can happen in several ways. In Greece, the culprit was the government, which built up more debt than it could handle. In the US, the risks lurked in the finances of banks and households.
In the case of China, the problem is primarily in the corporate sector. China’s big companies — especially those owned by the state — have done much of the borrowing. Higher debt means companies will have to spend more on interest and paying it back, and less on investing and hiring.
That is where a vicious cycle could come in. Less spending on investing and hiring hurts the overall economy, hitting corporate bottom lines and making it even harder for companies to pay off debt. Bad loans rise, banks freeze lending, confidence in the financial system can be shaken, leading to a full-fledged banking crisis.
China, which has the world’s second-largest economy after the US, plays a crucial role in generating global growth. Such a situation in China could ripple across the world.
On the other hand, a number of economists say China’s mountain of debt is not as scary as it appears.
HSBC chief economist for Greater China Qu Hongbin (屈宏斌) and his team argue that China’s debt is simply a result of the way its financial system works. For a variety of reasons, China’s corporations and households stash more money away than their peers in other nations. That cash piles up in banks and is turned into loans, resulting in China’s high level of debt.
Since the debt is backed by all that savings, it is not as risky, Qu says.
“Concerns about China’s debt levels reaching a critical threshold and posing a systemic risk are overblown,” the HSBC team wrote in April.
Others argue that China’s debt is less of a threat because it is to a great degree backed by the government. Much of it comes from state-run banks, which are the primary lenders to China’s large state-run companies. That means Beijing can stop banks from pushing borrowers too hard and would be more inclined to shore up the financial system, preventing the crisis that a more free-market economy might suffer.
The debt, too, is largely domestic, making China less likely to be pushed into a crisis by problems outside its borders, which have toppled debt-heavy emerging economies in the past.
Other economies, furthermore, have debt similar to or even bigger than China’s. Debt in the US, for instance, is about equivalent when compared with the size of the US economy. Japan’s is much larger, at about four times the size of its national output.
Still, there is ample evidence to suggest that a large expansion of debt almost always has disastrous consequences.
Capital Economics chief emerging markets economist Neil Shearing has studied more than 25 years of collapses in developing economies. He concludes that the pace of debt accumulation is more important than the overall level of debt in determining whether a nation faces a financial crisis. China’s pace of debt accumulation is well above the threshold he identified as indicating the potential for crisis.
Some economists say that even if China dodges a full-scale crisis, it might not be able to escape the damage caused by its rising debt. They fear that China could fall into a years-long slump like Japan, which has regularly suffered little or even no growth ever since its own banking crisis more than two decades ago.
In China’s case, the problems created by such an outcome would be much more painful, since it would enter that slow-growth period with its people at a much lower standard of living.
There are already signs that China’s debt is beginning to hamper progress in its economy. China’s banks have increased their lending to try to stimulate the economy, but the actual rate of growth has not picked up. That is partly because China’s economy requires more and more debt to produce the same economic results.
Wind Information general manager for North America Brandon Emmerich says that US$4 of new credit is necessary to generate just US$1 of additional GDP — the worst ratio since the depths of the last financial crisis.
One reason, Emmerich wrote in a newsletter, is that “most new debt in China goes to pay off old obligations rather than invest in new value-creating projects.”
After analyzing corporate bonds issued in China, he calculated that 42 percent of the money raised since last year was earmarked to pay off existing loans or expiring bonds, compared with only 8 percent in 2014.
In an August report, the IMF warned of “heightened downside risks” and the need for “decisive action” to reduce the economy’s reliance on credit, including reforming and even shutting down overly indebted companies.
“Vulnerabilities are still rising on a dangerous trajectory,” it said.
China has long defied predictions that it is heading for a crash and perhaps it will prove the doomsayers wrong yet again, but Beijing’s policymakers must limit the increase in debt without inflicting a severe blow to growth. That delicate balancing act is hard to manage, but Beijing might be left with no other choice.
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
US President Donald Trump created some consternation in Taiwan last week when he told a news conference that a successful trade deal with China would help with “unification.” Although the People’s Republic of China has never ruled Taiwan, Trump’s language struck a raw nerve in Taiwan given his open siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression seeking to “reunify” Ukraine and Russia. On earlier occasions, Trump has criticized Taiwan for “stealing” the US’ chip industry and for relying too much on the US for defense, ominously presaging a weakening of US support for Taiwan. However, further examination of Trump’s remarks in
It is being said every second day: The ongoing recall campaign in Taiwan — where citizens are trying to collect enough signatures to trigger re-elections for a number of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — is orchestrated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), or even President William Lai (賴清德) himself. The KMT makes the claim, and foreign media and analysts repeat it. However, they never show any proof — because there is not any. It is alarming how easily academics, journalists and experts toss around claims that amount to accusing a democratic government of conspiracy — without a shred of evidence. These
China on May 23, 1951, imposed the so-called “17-Point Agreement” to formally annex Tibet. In March, China in its 18th White Paper misleadingly said it laid “firm foundations for the region’s human rights cause.” The agreement is invalid in international law, because it was signed under threat. Ngapo Ngawang Jigme, head of the Tibetan delegation sent to China for peace negotiations, was not authorized to sign the agreement on behalf of the Tibetan government and the delegation was made to sign it under duress. After seven decades, Tibet remains intact and there is global outpouring of sympathy for Tibetans. This realization
RSS