Soft Landing

A great old friend asked me if I thought China would have a soft landing.

I am about as far from macroeconomics as an educated person can be, but I am forming a view.  It's through a tiny keyhole - or, maybe a better metaphor, I'm determining what's an elephant by feeling a couple of whiskers on his rear left foot.  But it's my view, after three days on the ground.  For what it's worth.

I'm seeing large, well-run companies that did not exist in 2000 that sell products solely to the China and Asia market.  Old rebuilt and brand new cities - with infrastructures that match ours in the USA - that are filled with polite, friendly people who appear to be working very hard.  An economic system that is guided by a government that seems to know, when it comes to economics, what it is doing.

So I don't know that we are looking at a landing, soft or hard, any time soon.  Unless you call a growth rate that drops to seven percent a year a landing.

I know a little of the history, how China has always followed periods of prosperity with violent turns against the emperor in power.  The weight of its huge population and its limited arable land.  And I'm not naive about its lack of American-style freedom and the toxic byproducts of its development.

But the whiskers are telling me that that there is no landing to come in this generation.