Sir Niall Ferguson

The population is falling and it is falling faster than people expected so that base case halves between now and the end of the century.

Second startling statistic, the public sector deficit is larger in China than in the United States today by IMF measure.

Because if you look at local government, which of course a proper public sector measure does,

There's just a huge amount of public sector borrowing still going on.

So you have actually got a public sector deficit north of 7% in China.

That means there are limits to just how much fiscal stimulus they can do.

And I think that the harsh reality is that despite the mood music coming out of Beijing, they still have a problem that is deflationary, that the property sector is very hard for them to fix.

And whether they may say they're going to have a 5% growth target, I just don't think they're going to do it.

I think they'll have to cook the books to get to 5%.

Yeah, I think it's a new story.

I'm not sure whether it's true, but it's certainly plausible enough at this point for the old story to be regarded with more skepticism by investors.

Now, that's not to say that

that the hyperscalers aren't still ahead.

And that's not to say that open AI is not making a lot of money.

I gather they're making money right now by allowing people to generate an infinite number of cartoons of themselves.

My general feeling is that if this is the net result of all of this innovation, we have a problem as a species.

But let's just assume that there are more important things going on and say drug discovery.

I think anybody who bets against Chinese engineering, anybody who bets against Chinese STEM is likely to lose their bet over a 10-year time horizon.

The

problem is that you're also making a bet on the CCP's ability to manage Chinese economic policy and national security.