“One of the hottest and most important debates about the global economy is whether China’s slowing economy would experience a hard or soft landing.
For the most part, experts have argued that the landing would be soft. In other words, the deceleration in growth would be moderate and manageable.
However, speaking at a conference, JP Morgan’s Adrian Mowat said that the slow down has been much more severe and would characterize a hard landing. From Bloomberg’s Weiyi Lim:
“If you look at the Chinese data, you should stop debating about a hard landing,” Mowat, who is based in Hong Kong, said at a conference in Singapore yesterday. “China is in a hard landing. Car sales are down, cement production is down, steel production is down, construction stocks are down. It’s not a debate anymore, it’s a fact.”
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“One should be concerned about what’s happening in the China property market,” Mowat said at yesterday’s conference. “People are too complacent that the government can turn what’s going on in this market.”
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“What you can look forward to is to see a pickup in property demand that will clear up the inventory; that doesn’t appear likely,” Mowat said in an interview after the conference yesterday. “I don’t see any evidence of a policy move that will cause the economy to reaccelerate.”
