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Business Daily: China Crisis

27/01/2010

China Crisis

BBC World Service - Business Daily, China Crisis

One of America's top investors is betting that China's property bubble will burst.

One of America's top investors, James Chanos tells us why he's betting against China's red-hot property market.

How well is the Chinese economy really doing? The latest figures show the economy grew at nearly nine per cent last year. The International Monetary Fund has forecast that this year's growth will be ten per cent. And there has been a chorus of predictions that China will soon overtake Japan as the world's second biggest economy. 

But there are also fears that the red-hot property and share markets are gigantic speculative bubbles. Money from the great rise in bank lending has fed these markets. The government has moved to slow lending. But some investors believe that China is heading for a fall. 

One of the most powerful of those is Jim Chanos, the legendary New York investor from Kynikos Associates. He built his fortune by foreseeing the collapse of Enron, and various troubles at other corporations. His method is called short-selling; he bets that companies' strategies will fail. He warned about the looming credit crisis back in April 2007.  

Now he tells Lesley Curwen he is concerned  about the overheating of the Chinese property market, and the consequences for commodities if the bubble bursts.

And whatever happened to the nineties kids called Generation X? We hear from Tamara Erickson, the author of 'What's Next, Gen X?'

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