I think that Clive Crook is gushing a bit too much in his column at Bloomberg cautioning us to beware of the China bubble’s inevitable collapse:
Singapore, which I’m visiting at the moment, opens your mind to the highly improbable. Rich, ethnically diverse, cheerfully efficient, globalized in the extreme, it’s a man-made economic miracle — astonishing proof of what market forces combined with superb top-down direction can achieve.
Even in Singapore, though, there are limits to what you can believe. I struggle to imagine, for instance, that China’s stock market isn’t a bubble.
China’s leadership has long been impressed with the Singapore model. Since Deng Xiaoping, its government has been much more interested in capitalism in the style of Lee Kuan Yew than class struggle in the style of Karl Marx. In China, the mix of markets and smart management has indisputably worked another miracle, and on a vastly larger scale than Lee’s.
There must be a good word for this particular style of journalism, made notorious by Tom Friedman in which you lavish praise on the Chinese leadership for all of the wrong things.
It’s not completely surprising that after abandoning its official policy of autarky China has grown quite a bit. High single digit or even double digit annual growth is easier than it sounds when starting from the base of an economy that’s almost completely supine. Whether “top-down direction” can continue the growth is another question entirely.
No time to care about the Chinese and their hackish ways — a disgruntled employee of a U.S. sports team hacked into his/her former employer’s account at a new U.S. sports team, using the same password retained btw/ jobs. It is quite possible that this will soon have more coverage than any Chinese scheme, and at the same time, have no impact on ill-advised retention of passwords.