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Business News/ News / World/  China will respond too late to avoid recession, says Citigroup
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China will respond too late to avoid recession, says Citigroup

Chinese slowdown will drag global growth to below 2%, says Willem Buiter

The global economy will expand by 3% this year, while China’s is forecast to grow 6.9%, the slowest pace in a quarter century, according to economists. Photo: Reuters Premium
The global economy will expand by 3% this year, while China’s is forecast to grow 6.9%, the slowest pace in a quarter century, according to economists. Photo: Reuters

New York: China is sliding into recession and the leadership will not act quickly enough to avoid a major slowdown by implementing large-scale fiscal policies to stimulate demand, Citigroup Inc.’s top economist Willem Buiter said.

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

“Despite the economy crying out for it, the Chinese leadership is not ready for this," Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, said in a media call hosted Thursday by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “It’s an economy that’s sliding into recession."

Premier Li is seeking to defend a 7% 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% 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%, compared with the official figure of 7%.

“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%—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% this year, while China’s is forecast to grow 6.9%, 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 $5 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 of deleveraging way without paying for the corporate sector to have a stock market bubble," he said. “And then of course the rather panic and incompetent reaction ensued in response," Buiter added in reference to the unprecedented government intervention to support share prices. Bloomberg

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Published: 28 Aug 2015, 08:55 AM IST
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