Peking University Professor: Chinese Loan Losses in Asia and Africa Reinforce Painful Lessons Learned in Venezuela

The following is a transcript of a nine-part Twitter thread posted by the prominent China economist Michael Pettis, a professor at Peking University.

As I have been writing since 2011, China’s development lending was always likely to follow the pattern of other countries when they first “went out” (e.g. the U.S. in the 1920s, USSR in the 1950s, Japan in the late 1970s). Because of little historical knowledge and no previous experience, an early rapid rise in development lending would be driven mainly by underestimating risk and an overestimation of their own business “success” in making loans, and would of course be further supported by geopolitical ambitions.