Dragonbeat is off this week, but will return with some thoughts on Tuesday October 27.
By Will Freeman
Will Freeman is a staff member of Dragonomics Advisory and is a guest contributor to Dragonbeat blog this week.
China’s rare earth miners, if you believe a flurry of recent newspaper articles, have the world’s producers of high-tech equipment by the short and curlies.
A draft plan by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to ban exports of certain rare-earth metals has fuelled fears of an impending global shortage of high-tech products reliant on these metals.
Although MIIT now assures that no such ban will be enforced, high-tech producers remain nervous. Rare-earth metals are used to make vital components in wind turbines, electric cars and a host of electronics appliances.
Our advice: don’t panic.
By Arthur Kroeber
Is China’s credit binge a financial time-bomb waiting to blow the country’s much-vaunted economic miracle to smithereens?
Beijing has long bet that the problem of bad loans can be solved by pushing off the day of reckoning into the future, with rapid economic growth reducing the size of the problem.
So far that calculated bet has proved a sound one.
But the unprecedented expansion in bank credit this year, coupled with last month’s decision to roll over for another decade the bonds used to finance the first non-performing loan (NPL) workout of 1999, make it a good time to submit this policy to a stress-test.
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