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.