Michael Pettis's Contributions

In an article in Wednesday’s Financial Times, Gabriel Wildau, Yuan Yang, and Tom Mitchell set out a range of economic outcomes for China. They propose three scenarios that they think—and I agree—are the most plausible ones.

The very first on the list of executive actions that his administration would implement from “day one,” according to US President-elect Donald Trump in his November 21, 2016, video clip, involved a US retreat on trade...

Foreign perceptions about the Chinese economy are far more volatile than the economy itself, and are spread across a fantastic array of forecasts. On one extreme there are still many who hold the view that overwhelmingly dominated...

It wasn’t enough that we started 2016 with one of the worst weeks in the recent history of Chinese and global markets, but the panic continued into the following weeks and wreaked a great deal of damage to confidence. A lot of the reflexive...

A recurring conversation I have with clients concerns the ability of banks to create credit, and of governments to monetize debt, and whether this ability is the solution to or the cause of financial instability and economic crisis.

With so much happening in China in the past month it seems that there are a number of very specific topics that any essay on China should focus. I worry, however, that we get so caught up staring at strange clumps...

Last Tuesday the PBoC surprised the markets with a partial deregulation of the currency regime, prompting a great deal of discussion and debate about the value of the RMB. Part of the discussion was informed by...

I plan to post a new entry very soon but before doing so I wanted to say a few things about the stock markets, which continue to be insane (but not unexpectedly so) and then repost a blog entry that is nearly five years old.

Anyone who reads my blog is already likely to know the story. Until the market peaked on June 12, with the Shanghai Composite at 5,178, China had experienced a stock market boom that saw the Shanghai index...

What can they possibly be thinking? This is not the sort of thing I normally write about, but I have to say that if I had any say in the matter I would most strenuously oppose removing or ‘diminishing” Alexander...

I was recently asked by an Australian economics journal to write a review of a book I had already read, The Leaderless Economy, by Peter Temin and David Vines (published in 2013). Because the book is a great place from which...

As I see it, the creation of the AIIB is not nearly as important as everyone seems to think, and if Beijing’s decision to create the AIIB, and Washington’s decision to oppose it, was part of the struggle for future geo-political...

The biggest constraint to the EU’s survival is debt. Economists are notoriously inept at understanding how balance sheets function in a dynamic system...Europe will not grow, the reforms will not “work”, and unemployment will not drop...

Today’s Financial Times has an article discussing the travails of Greece’s new Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis as he takes on Germany. The European debt crisis is not a conflict among nations. All economic systems...

Monetary policy is as much about politics as it is economics. It affects the ways in which wealth is created, allocated, and retained and it determines the balance of power between providers of capital and users of capital.

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”.

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?

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...

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.