Michael Pettis's Blog

Senior Associate

Michael Pettis is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. He has taught, from 2002 to 2004, at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and, from 1992 to 2001, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is also Chief Strategist at Shenyin Wanguo Securities (HK).

Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.

Pettis is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies Advisory Board at Columbia University as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at the School of Public and International Affairs. He received an MBA in Finance in 1984 and an MIA in Development Economics in 1981, both from Columbia University.

Inverted Balance Sheets and Doubling the Financial Bet

On Tuesday the National Bureau of Statistics released China’s 2014 GDP growth numbers and reported growth consistent with what the government has been widely promoting as the “new normal”.

How Will Long-Term Deflation in China Impact the World?

The current data suggests that China is facing deflationary pressures, much like Japan has since the early 1990s. How will this affect the world compared to Japan’s deflation and long might it take China to overcome this challenge?

My Reading of the FT on China’s “Turning Away From the Dollar”

The Financial Times ran a very interesting article last week called “China: Turning away from the dollar”. It got a lot of attention, at least among China analysts, and I was asked several times by friends and clients for my response. The authors, James Kynge and Josh Noble, begin...

How Might a China Slowdown Affect the World?

Two years ago it was hard to find analysts who expected average GDP growth over the rest of this decade to be less than 8%. The current consensus seems to have dropped to between 6% and 7% on average.

China, Europe, and Optimal Currency Zones

Although I think China is clearly much more integrated as an optimal currency zone than Europe is today, it is probably less integrated than the US (I will use the US and Europe as the two extreme cases between which China falls). China of course does not have the problems of multiple sovereignty...

How to Link Australian Iron With Marine le Pen

After last week’s tumultuous markets one of my clients sent me an email saying “I am so relieved your constant talk about worsening imbalances kept us from getting too complacent. Things really are as bad as you keep saying.”

Are We Starting to See Why Its Really the Exorbitant “Burden”

This may be excessively optimistic on my part, but there seems to be a slow change in the way the world thinks about reserve currencies. For a long time it was widely accepted that reserve currency status granted the provider of the currency substantial economic benefits.

How Much Longer Can the Global Trading System Last?

My last blog entry inspired an old Brazilian friend of mine, with whom I hadn’t had any contact for years, to comment on this section of the interview...

What Does a “Good” Chinese Adjustment Look Like?

I have always thought that the soft landing/hard landing debate wholly misses the point when it comes to China’s economic prospects. It confuses the kinds of market-based adjustments we are likely to see in the U.S. or Europe with the much more controlled process we see in China.

Why China’s Bad Debt Can’t Simply Be “Socialized”

Once again I am going to discuss debt, and my discussion will be mainly conceptual. I suspect that many of my regular readers might wonder why I keep returning to this subject – and, often enough, keep saying the same things.

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