China's Rise and the New Age of Gold: How Investors Can Profit from a Changing World

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How Bad Is China’s Debt Problem?

STRATFOR IS AN American geopolitical intelligence company that publishes forecasts of global trends. In 2005, it confidently predicted that “China will suffer a meltdown like Japan and East and Southeast Asia before it. The staggering proportion of bad debt, enormous even in relation to official dollar reserves, represents a defining crisis for China.” (Its report, China’s Economy, Running on Borrowed Time,” appeared on January 27, 2005.)

In 2010, hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, an oft-quoted darling of much of the financial media, said that China was on the verge of an economic collapse that would set it on a “treadmill to hell.” And more recently, in February 2019, the Financial Times ran an article by ...