[kayewiggin]

Let me put it in another way; it's similar to the US banks during 2008, when they appeared to be healthy, holding lots of subprime loans on their books.

If we are talking about China's credit, China has a lot of subprime loans to belt and road countries that have very little income, and lot of subprime loans to their citizens, which recently a scholar reported that 900M of them make less than $400/month.

[roenxi]

Possibly. But if the US system was a wealth-producing engine like China's has been in recent history 2008 wouldn't have been all that big a deal. They'd have bounced back in a year or two. Instead in 2008 the US made decisive moves to preserve a system that isn't generating much wealth for the US, and over the course of around 20 years they've arguably managed to give up their position as #1 global economy and are packing stadiums full of people chanting "We love Trump. We love Trump". Looks to me like it is going down in history as a major turning point for the worse.

If China has to take decisive steps to preserve whatever craziness is going on in the mainland, they're going to be preserving a system that has at least 10x-ed their wealth over the last 30 years while producing vast amounts of real capital that has catapulted their living standards up to a much more reasonable standard.

I wouldn't necessarily gamble on China because the system doing well looks unstable and could veer to disaster at any moment the central bureaucracy does something stupid. But we don't have strong evidence of a problem yet. We've got strong evidence they aren't acting like the US, but the US hasn't been setting an inspiring example in decades. As with a lot of economic problems, most of the damage from 2007 was doubling down on failing strategy rather than taking the hint that something needed to change.

And I'm not seeing evidence here that China is broke. They might muck this up, always an option, but they have all the tools they need to succeed in principle.