Michael Pettis is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. He has taught, from 2002 to 2004, at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and, from 1992 to 2001, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.
Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.
Pettis is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies Advisory Board at Columbia University as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at the School of Public and International Affairs. He received an MBA in Finance in 1984 and an MIA in Development Economics in 1981, both from Columbia University.
Submitted by chinastock on Sat, 08/28/2010 - 01:35
Cialis online: on August 8 Credit Suisse published a study they had commissioned by Professor Wang Xiaolu of the China Reform Foundation. A lot of readers have asked on- and offline me to discuss this study in light of the entry I posted two weeks ago about Chinese consumption – and especially to explain whether this study would cause me to retract any of the things I said.
Submitted by chinastock on Wed, 08/11/2010 - 00:56
There has been a lot of excited press commentary recently about China’s overtaking Japan as the world’s second largest economy. China’s GDP should be larger than Japan’s for the first time sometime this year, which in a similar context in 1987 the Italians called “il sorpasso”. For all the excited search for the deeper meaning of this event, however, I would argue that if we examine the change in relative position from the point of view of not just what happened to Chinese GDP in the past twenty years, but also what happened to Japanese GDP, there may be less cause for celebration than we
Submitted by chinastock on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 03:08
A lot of people have asked me to write about the recently “leaked” CBRC report on dodgy local government debt. Here is what the article in Monday’s Bloomberg had to say about it (and note especially that delicious second paragraph):
Submitted by chinastock on Tue, 07/20/2010 - 03:59
In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble. The most common question is whether or not there is a threshold of debt (measured, say, against total GDP) above which we need to start worrying.
Submitted by chinastock on Wed, 07/14/2010 - 06:03
Since this is another long posting, it might make sense to summarize briefly its two parts. In the first part, expanding on an OpEd piece of mine published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, I argue that China’s “nuclear option”, which has generated a great deal of nervousness among investors and policy-making circles in the US, is a myth, and what the US should be much more concerned about is its diametric opposite – a tsunami of capital flooding into the country.
Submitted by chinastock on Sun, 07/04/2010 - 06:56
Just three days after returning to Beijing from New York, I had to leave again, this time to a series of conferences in Torino, Italy, so it is hard to do much writing for my blog, especially since I won’t spend my free time in the hotel when there is so damned much food out here that urgently needs sampling. Still, I did want to write a hurried note about a topic of conversation that came up a lot while I was in the US and even more here in Italy.
Submitted by chinastock on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 17:09
With the PBoC’s currency announcement last Saturday and the surge (!) in the value of RMB on Monday (all very kindly timed to add zest to my meetings this week in Boston, New York, and Washington), you would assume that today’s entry would be all about the RMB and the effect of the PBoC announcement. But aside from a brief aside to say that I am a little skeptical that this announcement adds up to much beyond a desire to head off China-bashing at the G20 meeting – bad news for Germany, who will now have to absorb much of the heat – I plan instead to discuss what I think the history of sove
Submitted by chinastock on Tue, 06/15/2010 - 07:15
I apologize for waiting two weeks since my last post, but my schedule has been crazier than usual what with the SED meeting and a number of conferences and visitors to Beijing. What’s more, next week I will go to New York and environs for a week, followed by a week in Italy. It always takes a huge amount of time to prepare for these things, although the Italian trip will be as much holiday as work. Among other things I will have a chance to have dinner with legendary American composer and Rome resident, Alvin Curran, who performed in my club when he visited Beijing three years ago.
Submitted by chinastock on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 15:49
It has not been a good year for the Shanghai stock market. Since its closing peak at 6092 in October 2007, the closing high in the past year or so on Shanghai’s SSE composite was 3471, on August 4 last year.
Submitted by chinastock on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 03:00
How much does the Greek crisis matter for China? There are, as far as I see, broadly two schools of thought. One school says that the Greek crisis is largely a problem internal to Europe, and its impact on Europe and the rest of the world is too small to matter much. In support they point to limited bilateral trade relationships between China and the most affected European countries.
