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The CEO of the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, says we all have to be worried about China’s debt as its economy slows, although he’s bullish on the economy in the long run.
The biggest players in finance have mixed views on the eastern giant. While Fink thinks government policy can spur growth in China, billionaire investor George Soros said last month that the country’s growing debt bubble looks just like the US before the 2008 crisis.
Not that Fink is all sunshine and rainbows on China. “You can’t grow at 6% and have your balance sheets grow faster,” Fink tells Bloomberg. “In the future, I would prefer seeing the economy growing 6% with some form of deleveraging.”
New credit in China ballooned a record $706B in Q1, outstripping the level during the depths of the global financial crisis in '09. Total debt from companies, governments and households was 247% of GDP last year, up from 164% in 2008, Bloomberg reports.
Hedge fund manager and prophet of the 2008 crash Kyle Bass warned investors of the Chinese debt bubble back in February, with a letter under the ominous title "The $34 Trillion Experiment: China's Banking System and the World's Largest Macro Imbalance.”
Bass wrote that analysts looking at the country underestimated the size of its debt problem, and he predicted losses of over four times the damage done by the 2008 subprime crisis. [Bloomberg]
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