Citigroup Says China Is Pushing World Towards Economic Crash

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Citigroup accuse China of dragging the world into a recession

Citigroup’s chief economist Willem Buiter has criticised China for not responding quickly enough to the current economic crisis and recession the country is facing. 

Buiter says that china could push the world into a recession unless it acts quickly with “large-scale fiscal policies”.

Canberratimes.com.au reports:

The only thing to stop a Chinese recession, which the former external member of the Bank of England defines as 4 per cent growth on “the mendacious official data” for a year, is a consumption-oriented fiscal stimulus program funded by central government and monetised by the People’s Bank of China, Buiter said.

“Despite the economy crying out for it, the Chinese leadership is not ready for this,” said Buiter, the man who coined the term “Grexit” during the Greek debt crisis.

China “is an economy that’s sliding into recession,” the renowned chief economist at Citigroup told a media call hosted Thursday by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Premier Li is seeking to defend a 7 per cent economic growth goal at a time when concern over slowing demand in China is fuelling volatility in global markets. The true rate of expansion “is probably something closer to 4.5 per cent, or less,” Buiter said.

Li has repeatedly pledged to avoid stimulus similar to the one following the global financial crisis in 2008 that led to a surge in debt for local governments and corporations.

Data accuracy

Some economists and investors have long questioned the accuracy of China’s official growth data. When Li was party secretary of Liaoning province in 2007, he said that figures for gross domestic product were “man-made” and therefore unreliable, according to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks in 2010. The median estimate of 11 economists surveyed by Bloomberg earlier this month put China’s first-half GDP growth rate at 6.3 per cent, compared with the official figure of 7 per cent.

“They will respond, but they will respond too late to avoid a recession, which is likely to drag the global economy with it down to a global growth rate below 2 per cent — which is in my definition a global recession,” said Buiter, a former external member of the Bank of England.

The global economy will expand by 3 per cent this year, while China’s is forecast to grow 6.9 per cent, the slowest pace in a quarter century, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

The boom and bust in the Shanghai Composite Index, which more than doubled in about a year before a selloff erased $7 trillion in market value in two months, is raising questions about “the competence of the Chinese authorities as managers of the macro economy,” Buiter said.

The authorities first cheered the stock market rally “because quite a few of the local pundits believed that this was a great [way of deleveraging, or reducing debt] without paying for the corporate sector to have a stock market bubble,” he said. That was followed by “panic and incompetent reaction” to the sharemarket turmoil, Buiter added in reference to China’s unprecedented government intervention to support share prices.

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