Why China is set to hit the Great Wall of Debt

The engine of global growth is set to slow sharply and that will have implications for investors all around the world, author Dinny McMahon tells Merryn Somerset Webb.

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China's Great Wall of Debt is less visible but more threatening
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Adecade ago analysts talked about China as a "miracle economy". No one could quite believe the magnitude of its change. We were stunned by the speed of income growth, the scale of the infrastructure projects and huge volume of exports coming out of the country. We aren't stunned any more. These days we see Chinese economic power as less miracle than inevitability. We don't talk about if China will become the biggest economy in world. We talk about when. Along the way, the idea of Chinese exceptionalism has taken hold. The Chinese, we tend to believe, are different they have found a path to fast GDP growth that doesn't rely on democratic capitalism (the route that has worked so well for the rest of us) and, better still, avoids the boom-bust cycle that comes with it.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.