Instead of giving the money to bankers to bailout toxic paper, China is following in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It will be interesting to see which plan actually works, the US or China’s.
The 4 trillion yuan plan ($849 billion), equivalent to about 20% of China’s GDP, is the biggest injection of cash by a government in history.
The Chinese package is expected to focus overwhelmingly on construction. A statement by China’s State Council said the money would be spent on 10 projects including low-income housing, rural infrastructure, water, electricity, transportation, the environment, technological innovation and rebuilding from disasters.
theage.com.au (nov 11): The Great China Bailout
It is also interesting that China expects its own population to pick up the slack in business lost to Chinese factories because Americans are spending less.
The measures are just shy of the $700bn (£442bn) bail-out promised by the United States, but are wider and more comprehensive than the American plan.
The Chinese government said it would “massively” crank up its spending on roads, railways, healthcare, education, power grids and low-cost housing. It also abolished the tight limits on lending that applied to banks, in a move that will open up credit to tens of millions of riskier borrowers.
The State Council said it would boost the economy partly through hiring millions of workers to build a slew of new projects and partly by encouraging Chinese, who are traditionally inclined to save their money, to spend more.
The government hopes that Chinese households will replace American families as the main customers for China’s slew of low-cost factories. Currently, almost 40pc of China’s economy is tied to exports.
Timothy Bond, chief Asian economist at Merrill Lynch, compared the package to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which shored up the American economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929. “The past two weeks have emphasised a simple point,” he said. “Policy works. In China’s case we expect this positive policy to prevent a sharp slowdown.”
He added: “Financing is not an issue. Public debt is only 21pc of gross domestic product.” In the UK, the official statistics show public debt is 43.4pc of GDP, while the ratio is nearly 61pc in the US.
telegraph.co.uk (nov 10): China’s bailout package hailed as ‘New Deal’ for its people
