seanmcdirmid 4 days ago

China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.

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bobthepanda 4 days ago

There’s that and the LGFVs financed by land sales which are all off official balance sheets.

coliveira 3 days ago

Debt in China is not a big issue, because Chinese banks are mostly owned by the Government. They can rearrange debt to deal with problems much more freely than Western governments.

bobthepanda 3 days ago

while this is true, they also have to do a lot more management of capital than most and it's a very delicate balancing act. Already, you have issues with bank confidence and normal people getting fleeced by fradulent or overly risky financial products because of the government's interventions in banking.

Japan used to be activist towards in its banks too, and it was very good until it was catastrophic one day.

coliveira 3 days ago

The existence of overly risky products is something observed in Western banking as well. And a catastrophe caused by the banking system is not unheard of in the USA. So I don't see how this is a problem unique to China. In fact they have much more flexibility to solve issues in this area.