Speech at Wilson Center in DC
I will be giving a speech in Washington, DC this Thursday, sponsored by the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I welcome you to attend or watch it online.
The topic of my talk is “The Beijing Consensus: Fact or Fallacy?” I’ll be discussing the “China model” that has attracted so much interest in the wake of the global economic crisis. I will try to get to the bottom of exactly what it means, and to what extent it poses a viable and sustainable alternative to the free trade / free markets model that has, at least until now, prevailed in the West.
The talk will take place at 10:00am – 11:30am on Thursday, June 30, at the Wilson Center’s 4th Floor Conference Room, which is located in the southeast wing of the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, in Washington, DC. The closest Metro station is Federal Triangle on the blue and orange lines. A photo ID is required to enter. For detailed directions, click here. To RSVP to attend the event, click here. Media organizations should contact the Kissinger Institute in advance at sandy.pho@wilsoncenter.org.
For those who are unable to attend in person, the Wilson Center will host a live webcast online. For information on viewing the webcast, click here. If the webcast is recorded and posted online, I will post a link to it on this blog.
A Bloomberg News today showed the results of what seems to be a very different debt to GDP ratio than normally annouced concerning China. Some excerps below. Reuters had also written on the subject at the end of May (http://www.bnn.ca/News/2011/05/31/China-to-clean-up-billions-in-local-debt-report.aspx). What do you think about that? Rough estimations could bring the real figure of that ratio to 70%. Moreover there has been previous bank balance sheets of banks in the 1990s and later whereby portoflio management companies were created. History seems not be a worthy lesson for change. What are the risks of an implosion? Thank you for your comments.
David
————————-
June 27 (Bloomberg) — China’s first audit of local
government debt found liabilities of 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.7
trillion) and warned of repayment risks, including reliance on
land sales and investment in stock markets.
A total of 148 financing vehicles set up by local
governments already had more than 8 billion yuan in overdue
debt,…
“Some local government financing platforms’ management is
irregular, and their profitability and ability to pay their
debts is quite weak,” Liu Jiayi, the country’s auditor-general
said today, according to a transcript of his speech. Some local
governments offered non-compliant guarantees or issued debt
directly, while others are relying heavily on land income to
repay, Liu said.
…Local governments, barred from selling bonds or
borrowing directly from banks, had set up 6,576 financing
vehicles by the end of 2010 to raise money, the audit showed.
Governments from 12 provinces, 307 cities and 1,131
townships have pledged to use revenues from land sales to repay
a combined outstanding debt of 2.55 trillion yuan. More than 35
billion yuan of money borrowed by local governments went into
the stock and property markets or prohibited projects, the
report showed…
… China found five of the country’s commercial banks have
issued 58 billion yuan of loans that violated loan rules, Liu
said in his speech. The audit found 4,407 low-income rental
apartments that had been used in violation of rental or sales
rules in 2010. A total of 4,247 apartments have been allocated
to unqualified families, it said.
———————————