Michael Pettis

With last night's China PMI disappointing expectations and eking out a just-expansionary miasma of hope for the growth enthusiasts, the very real question of global growth sustainability (while not on US equity market participants' minds) is coming to the fore. As Michael Pettis notes, Martin Wolf's recent perspective that it may be useful to think about Japan as a model for understanding the adjustment process in China since the Japanese model shows how risky it is to shift to a slow-growth model. While expectations for a 'relatively moderate' slowdown are common (at rates considered rapid for most economies); Pettis asks rhetorically, if part of the explanation for China’s spectacular growth of the past three decades has to do with the positive feedback loops that are so typical of developing countries with fragile and unsophisticated financial systems, then a moderate slowdown in growth may be an impossible target to achieve. Once growth starts to slow, the self-reinforcing impact on urbanization, on credit growth, on financial distress, and on expectations may force growth rates to drop far more sharply than any 'plausible' analysis would suggest.

Despite the many differences between China and the U.S., their basic problems are remarkably similiar: an economy that increasingly serves a tiny Elite, and a political/financial system that is incapable of meaningful reform. Setting aside the latest bird flu outbreak and sagging indicators of growth, China 2.0 is in trouble (with 1.0 being the Communist era of 1949 -1977 and 2.0 being the modernization/globalization era of 1978 - 2013), for it remains overly reliant on unsustainable growth dynamics. Add it all up and you get a clear picture of a government and economy that is incapable of making the kind of structural reforms that are needed to make growth sustainable.

Up until just a week or so ago, the euro, the market seems to be telling us, has been saved, and peripheral Europe is widely seen as being out of the woods. Thanks to the ECB - who are willing to pump as much liquidity into the markets as it needs - it seems rising debt levels, greater political fragmentation, and a worsening economy somehow don't really matter and it is impolitic to sound pessimistic. But is peripheral Europe really suffering primarily from a liquidity crisis? It would help me feel a lot better if I could find even one case in history of a sovereign solvency crisis in which the authorities didn’t assure us for years that we were facing not a solvency crisis, but merely a short-term problem with liquidity. A sovereign solvency crisis always begins with many years of assurances from policymakers in both the creditor and the debtor nations that the problem can be resolved with time, confidence, and a just few more debt rollovers. The key point is that bankers are not stupid. They just could not formally acknowledge reality until they had built up sufficient capital through many years of high earnings – thanks in no small part to the help provided by the Fed in the form of distorted yield curves and free money – to recognize the losses without becoming insolvent.

The great trade, capital flow and debt imbalances that were built up over the preceding two decades must reverse themselves. Michael Pettis notes, however, that these imbalances can continue for many years, but at some point they become unsustainable and the world must adjust by reversing those imbalances. One way or the other, in other words, the world will rebalance. But there are worse ways and better ways it can do so. Pettis adds that, any policy that does not clearly result in a reversal of the deep debt, trade and capital imbalances of the past decade is a policy that cannot be sustained. It is likely to be political considerations that determine how quickly the rebalancing processes take place and whether they do so in ways that set the stages for future growth or future stagnation. Pettis' guess is that we have ended the first stage of the global crisis, and most of the deepest problems have been identified. In 2013 we will begin to see how policymakers respond and what the future outlook is likely to be. The following 10 themes are what he will be watching this year in order to figure out where we are likely to end up.

The IMF’s Il Houng Lee, Murtaza Syed, and Liu Xueyan have published a very interesting and widely noticed study called “Is China Over-Investing and Does it Matter?” In it they argue that there is strong evidence that China is overinvesting significantly. China’s investment rate is so high, that even ignoring the tremendous evidence of misallocated investment, unless we can confidently propose that Beijing has uncovered a secret formula that allows it to identify high quality investment in a way that no other country in history has been able, there is likely to be a systematic tendency to wasted investment. The extent of Chinese overinvestment – even if we assume that it has not already caused significant fragility in the banking system and enormous hidden losses yet to be amortized – requires a very sharp contraction just to get back to a “normal” which, in the past, was anyway associated with difficult economic adjustments. It is hard to imagine how such a sharp contraction in investment will itself not lead to a sharp drop in GDP growth.

While China's equity index continues to plumb new depths, the macro data of the past two weeks has been the crutch for US equity bulls losing faith in the fiscal cliff negotiations - growth is up, investment is up, and inflation is down - with analysts hailing the news as evidence that the Chinese economy has "truly bottomed out." As Michael Pettis, of China Financial Markets, notes though "I think we need to be very cautious and refrain from allowing ourselves to get too caught up in the huge sigh of relief that the sell side is heaving. Growth rates in China will continue to slow dramatically in the next few years, and if there are temporary lulls, as there must be, these do not represent any sort of “bottoming out” at all." His perspective is simply that Beijing cannot afford 'politically' to allow the transition/adjustment/reforms to take place too fast - and occasionally needs "to step on the investment accelerator." The bottom-line, he notes, is that "you can get as much growth as you like if you expand credit, but once expanding credit has become the problem, it cannot also be a permanent solution to slower growth. The country’s balance sheet continues to deteriorate – and the most recent growth spurt implies faster deterioration – and this, ultimately, is the main constraint of the Chinese growth model."

For two decades the rate of growth of world trade volumes considerably outstripped that of industrial production as credit-fueled globalization created huge imbalances in the world. As Diapason Commodities' Sean Corrigan indicates in these three simple charts, all that vendor-financed circular exuberance has come to an end. The bottom-line is that forced deleveraging (not least of which in Europe) is crushing the credit-fueled (and unsustainable) dream of endless growth as debt saturation has been reached (on private and now public balance sheets). To wit: Global Trade Volume growth is deep in the danger zone and about to turn negative; as the hopes of so many Sinomaniacs and Pollyannas is slowly peeled back to a righteous recognition of reality.

Whether you believe China is an economic miracle - or a government-sponsored fraud; and can ignore the broken growth model or believe that the CCP can bailout the world; Michael Pettis, of China Financial Markets, provides a much-needed dose of reality for bulls and bears when it comes to the future of the global growth engine. After summing up (and laying-waste to) the three mainstays of China bulls' arguments: he asks the three toughest questions any China bull must be able to answer. Analogizing China's position perfectly he cites Mills: "Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." Simply put, the bull argument cannot ignore the hidden bad debt.

As markets continue to yo-yo and commentators deliver mixed forecasts, investors are faced with some tough decisions and have a number of important questions that need answering. On a daily basis we are asked what’s happening with oil prices alongside questions on China’s slowdown, why global trade will collapse if Romney wins, why investors should get out of stocks, why the Eurozone is doomed, and why we need to get rid of fractional reserve lending. Answering these and more, Mike Shedlock's in-depth interview concludes: "The gold standard did one thing for sure. It limited trade imbalances. Once Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, the U.S. trade deficit soared (along with the exportation of manufacturing jobs). To fix the problems of the U.S. losing jobs to China, to South Korea, to India, and other places, we need to put a gold standard back in place, not enact tariffs."

In 2006, Michael Pettis (one of the best known on-the-ground academic-and-practitioner experts on China) started making a number of predictions based on what he thought was the necessary and logical development of China’s growth model. Some of these predictions seemed fairly outlandish, especially to China analysts – Chinese and foreign – who had very little knowledge of economic history or other developing countries, but many of them so far have turned out quite well. As more and more analysts are beginning to understand the constraints of the Chinese growth model he thought it might be useful to list some of these predictions to get a sense of what might be still to come. Hold on to your hard-landing hats.

Report: China Surpassed U.S. in 2010

“Some wags are saying this downgrade is already built in, but with the level of cognitive dissonance in the market I say otherwise. I am sure all the government put mucky mucks are meeting over the weekend and are stirring and preparing their usual toxins to stem any blowback." (Russ Winter)

"Look for a huge shock when they announce just how much more debt the gummit will need to sell compared to what was originally estimated"

Only The Bernank is fool enough to lend money to US at these rates but, then again, he's only lending us our own money so it's not like he himself is taking on any risk at all.

• Bailout a ‘Flawed Plan’ Forced on Irish People (Irish Times)
• Obama’s Debt Plan Sets Stage for Long Battle Over Spending (NYT)
• America Must Give Up on the Dollar (Michael Pettis)
• Banks Forced to Pay Foreclosure Victims as Talks Continue (Bloomberg)
• Budget Rises as Most Important Problem to Highest Since '96 (Gallup)
• Calls grow for Japan PM to quit in wake of quake (Reuters)
• Find the discrepancy of these two headlines:
  • China to See More Interest Rate Hikes in Q2 (China Daily)
  • China Banks Said to Need $131 Billion of Equity Over Six Years (Reuters)
• Hong Kong Considers More Property Measures (WSJ)
• Glencore seeks up to $12.1 billion in IPO, no chair yet (Reuters)