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Michael Pettis 118 posts 0 comments

Michael Pettis is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987. Pettis is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies Advisory Board at Columbia University as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at the School of Public and International Affairs. He received an MBA in Finance in 1984 and an MIA in Development Economics in 1981, both from Columbia University. He writes the blog .

Economy

Will Greece unravel by Christmas?

Michael Pettis Nov 22, 2011

Without a credible intervention this process almost always ends the same way. There is in my opinion a very high probability that within weeks, or months at most, Greece will be forced to freeze bank deposits as a prelude to leaving the…

Political Economy

Germany must do it, not China

Michael Pettis Nov 7, 2011

So how do we explain the European crisis? One theory is that the European crisis was caused by the moral turpitude and spendthrift habits of lazy Europeans along the periphery, in sharp contrast to the hard-working and thrifty countries of…

Economy

Expect a lot more trade intervention

Michael Pettis Nov 2, 2011

The currency may well be undervalued, but a significant rise in the RMB, especially if it is countered domestically by an increase in credit at lower real rates, might actually make the global imbalances worse and, more worryingly, cause…

Political Economy

BRICs to the rescue

Michael Pettis Oct 6, 2011

Turning to foreign sources of capital will only aggravate the problem from which Europe already suffers. Even assuming that developing countries are willing to take on risks that Europeans find prohibitive, their help will not improve…

Political Economy

The longer we delay, the worse it will be for peripheral Europe

Michael Pettis Sep 25, 2011

As I see it, we cannot continue with the existing currency arrangement. Countries like Spain (I am reverting to my habit of calling all the deficit countries “Spain” and all the surplus countries “Germany”) simply will not adjust quickly…

Economy

Big in Japan

Michael Pettis Sep 12, 2011

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…

Some predictions for the rest of the decade

Michael Pettis Aug 28, 2011

Markets have been crazy this month, but rather than try to wade through all the news, much of which doesn’t seem to have much informational content, I thought I would duck out altogether and instead make a list of things I expect will…

Political Economy

Foreign capital, go home!

Michael Pettis Aug 17, 2011

Once again we are hearing very worried noises from various sectors about the possibility of a reduction in Chinese purchases of USG bonds. Is the PBoC going to stop buying USG bonds?

Economy

China: no hard landing, but no solution

Michael Pettis Aug 1, 2011

I have been arguing for a while that as long as the Chinese government retains its capacity to raise debt we are not going to see a sharp slowdown in economic growth – at least until 2013. Any indication that the economy is slowing too…

Political Economy

Dilemma over current account vendor financing

Michael Pettis Jul 19, 2011

There seems to be an aggrieved sense on the part of creditor nations that after providing so much helpful funding to undisciplined debtors, the creditors are going to be left with losses. There is, they claim, something terribly unfair…