Michael Pettis's Blog

From the early 1980s until now China has grown at a pace not matched since the four decades Argentina enjoyed before the First World War. In spite of some fairly goofy attempts a few years ago, however...

It might seem almost churlish to wonder what would happen if Spain were to leave the euro. The official European position is that the battle of the euro has been pretty much won, and anyone who argues otherwise will be accused of being a euro hater, an Anglo-Saxon or, even worse, a writer for the Financial Times.

We recently interviewed the esteemed economist and financial strategist Michael Pettis out of Beijing regarding the ongoing debate of whether China will see a massive credit crunch or growth collapse.

Debate about the global savings glut hypothesis is mired in confusion, a fundamental one of which is the seemingly obvious but false claim that a global savings glut must lead to higher global savings.

A new study complied by the World Bank has generated some pretty excited and, to some, alarming headlines about the new world order. There has been limited reference to this in the Chinese press, for reasons I will discuss...

I don’t often make reference to these kinds of things in my blog, but Saturday’s terrorist attack in the Kunming train station – in which 29 innocent people were hacked to death (the toll was especially high among the elderly who...

I got a lot of feedback from my January 5 blog entry because of my argument that the implementation of the reforms proposed in the Third Plenum all but guarantees that growth rates in China will slow down. For that reason I thought it might make sense for me to explain a little more carefully why...

Although still vague on the specifics, China’s Third Plenum November partially clarified the nature of the reforms that Beijing is proposing for China over the coming year. Of course very little was said in any of the related releases about the difficulties...

In order to understand much of what is happening in China I believe it is crucially important to understand how financial systems operate under condition of financial repression.

The past two years have seen a surprising amount of turmoil at the highest levels of the Chinese political establishment. We have seen political alliances re-shuffled, powerful business and political leaders arrested, factional disputes magnified, and an explosion of rumors of more to come.