There’s ‘No Way’ Beijing Will Meet Its 5.5% Growth Target, Stephen Roach Says
May 6, 2022
China is facing “enormous risk” and at the moment and is unlikely to meet its economic growth target for the year, according to economist Stephen Roach, who has been a longtime bull on the Asian giant.
“I’m a congenital bull on China,” Roach told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Friday. “That’s not the case for me now though.”
“I think China’s facing formidable pressures,” said Roach, a former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman who is currently a senior fellow at Yale University. “There’s no way it’s going to make its 5.5% forecast.”
China … is not going to bail the world out the way it did after the global financial crisis.
Beyond the economic impact of rolling lockdowns as authorities in China continue to stick to a strict zero-Covid strategy and a “steadfast insistence” on deleveraging — or cutting debt — the economist also described President Xi Jinping’s decision to “tie himself to the villain of Vladimir Putin” as a “really significant mistake.”
The expected slowdown in the Chinese economy is set to have ramifications worldwide, Roach warned, with Beijing now unable to bail out the world the same way it did after the global financial crisis.
“From 2009 to 2012 ... China was growing, you know, 8% and that cushion kept the world from lapsing back into a recession,” he said. “That cushion is gone.”
“China … is not going to bail the world out the way it did after the global financial crisis,” Roach said. “This is problematic for the global economic outlook as well,” he added.