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.

When Are Markets “Rational”?

Last month’s award of the Nobel Price in economics set off a great deal of chortling because one of the three recipients, Eugene Fama, received the award for saying that markets are efficient at capital allocation and another, Robert Schiller, received the award for saying they are not.

Will Debt Derail Abenomics?

It seems to me that one of the automatic, if not always intended, consequences of Abenomics is to force up Japan’s current account surplus, and in fact to force it up substantially.

Hidden Debt Must Still Be Repaid

Five or six years ago, a few skeptics first started pointing out that the credit dynamics underlying Chinese growth was creating an unsustainable increase in debt. This, they warned, would ultimately undermine the banking system and cause growth to collapse if it were not addressed in time.

Revisiting My 2011 Predictions

Since the beginning of the global crisis in 2007-08 I have argued that the crisis was a consequence primarily of global trade imbalances generated by structural features that led to significant saving imbalances in China...

Why China Will Average 3-4% Growth Over the Next Decade

As analysts and official entities like the World Bank continue to downgrade their forecasts for medium-term growth in China, I have been asked increasingly often for the reasons I believe that 3-4% average annual growth rates is likely to be the upper limit for China during the adjustment period.

The Chinese Urbanization Fallacy

The latest default bull argument supporting higher levels of growth in China than I believe possible is the urbanization argument.

The Changing Debate Over China’s Economy

Once again I apologize for taking so long to repair my blog, but it hasn’t been easy. We are slowly fixing up the mess on my website. There will be a link on the site directing interested readers to the old site if anyone wants to read older blog entries.

Beijing’s New Leaders Are Right to Hold Back

The world is struggling to rebalance its great savings imbalances and is not advancing much. In Europe, and as I discussed in my very long May 11 blog entry, it seems that Germany is still unable to force though the adjustments needed in internal demand and is hoping to foist its imbalances onto the rest of the world now that the rest of Europe is too sick to absorb them.

How Much Investment Is Optimal?

I believe that in the past two to three years there has been a significant and welcome shift in Beijing’s attitude towards maintaining growth, and that this shift implicitly represents a shift from the capital frontier model of optimal investment levels to the social capital model.

Excess German Savings, Not Thrift, Caused the European Crisis

One of the reasons that it is been so hard for a lot of analysts, even trained economists, to understand the imbalances that were at the root of the current crisis is that we too easily confuse national savings with household savings.

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