Chinese ingenuity, the new Soviet incompetence?
Posted by Dalton48 on 05 Aug 2008 at 01:22 pm | Tagged as: Business
From the GMO quarterly newsletter, a dissenting voice on the Chinese miracle:
No sooner do we finish wallowing in the idea of Soviet incompetence than we start to believe that Chinese central planners can wonderfully manage a complicated economy, growing unprecedentedly fast and transforming overnight from a rural society to a capital-intensive wonder using half of some of the world’s resources. Economic logic and history suggest that their governmental interferences will be sub-optimal, and that China’s current level of investment will turn out to be dangerously high, encouraging waste. They continue to build basic capacity on automatic pilot even as they encounter dangerous times for their export-led economy, since we are all facing the rising probability of a global slowdown in economic growth and trade. China also has to deal with rising energy costs in their particularly energy inefficient economy. Surely they will stumble. And if we are all unlucky, they will stumble right into the global credit crisis.
Uncle Ned actually sent me to Peking. They will stumble, and it will be a smoggy stumble. I rather believe (hope, actually) that China will show it’s true colours to the world this month.