Robert Peston
speaker
59 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2012
last heard Jan 2015
Robert Peston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, the number that I've been obsessed with for, you know, actually decades now has been the rate of China's growth.
For 30 years, it grew at a sort of mind-boggling rate, 10% a year.
But that all stopped when the global economy hit the skids in 2008.
And actually, it fell very sharply.
And then the Chinese government did something remarkable, which is it persuaded its banks to lend as if there was no tomorrow.
And they lent for investment and investment in China went up from an already amazingly high 40 odd percent of GDP to about 50 percent of GDP.
And the growth rate picked up again.
So half of all the money in China is being spent on investment goods rather than consumption.
Unbelievable.
I mean, you know, there's been nothing like it in the history of capitalism, basically.
I mean, it's astonishing.
And finance by debt.
The Chinese have worked out that this new way of growing through debt funded investment rather than exports can't go on forever, that it's actually potentially quite dangerous.
And so they're trying to reconstruct the economy, but it's not going desperately well.
And actually, they're still too dependent on investment.
So basically, growth has come down.
It's come down to just under 7.5% now.
I'm not sure we can trust these numbers, to be honest.
One of the things I was going to preface all this by saying is my world number is sort of actually quite difficult to pin down because I think most of us would say if we're slightly uneasy about most government statistics, we're profoundly uneasy about China's statistics.
But we do know that China is slowing down.
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