Word: china
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...Another China skeptic is Pivot Capital Management, investment manager of the $505 million Pivot Global Value Fund. In an August report, it makes the startling claim that China is not 45% urbanized as the World Bank and other international agencies estimate. That figure could be "understated as much as 20%," says Pivot, "meaning that instead of about 350 million people, only 100 million actually would need to be urbanized...
...This is key, Pivot says, because it indicates in coming years there will be a dwindling in GDP-boosting activities such as construction. China's "industrialization and structural modernization are largely complete," according to Pivot's report. As a result, new investments will end up funding unneeded factories, buildings and roads. He concludes that the country's capital spending boom is unsustainable because it is "outstripping previous great transformation periods" experienced by Thailand and Asia's other tiger economies, as well as Germany and Japan...
...Skepticism about China is not new. Lawyer Gordon Chang published The Coming Collapse of China in 2001, and he's been waiting for the thud ever since. In a recent column in Forbes magazine, Chang insisted China's third-quarter GDP growth this year is unlikely to be "anywhere near" the official 8.9% cited by Beijing...
...Unlike Chang, Pivot Capital appears to accept China's reported growth in 2009 at face value, but says the "burst in economic activity has been inflated by a front-loaded stimulus package and a surge in credit growth," two drivers that will run out of steam in 2010. "The chances of a hard landing are increasing," the report warns. "The coming slowdown in China has the potential to be a similar watershed even for world markets as the reversal of the U.S. subprime and housing boom...
...hard to tell if the skeptics are right. China is like the proverbial elephant being described by blind men: anyone can say anything depending on which part they happen to be touching. Jim O'Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs, is dismissive of the doubters. "I've seen similar sorts of stories about 20 times this year," O'Neill said last week during an interview on Bloomberg TV. "These are generally written by people that obviously just don't follow closely or study China." He maintained that, if anything, China's economic strength is being underestimated...