China Boom CMS

<p>I'm an economist by training and for 25 years headed up Morgan Stanley's Global Economics Team. And it was probably the Asian financial crisis of '97-'98, when the region that was supposed to be the new miracle for the global economy was in shambles, and our economics team, like most, we were just behind the curve, we had no idea what was going on. We were marking our forecast for Asia and for the global economy down by a significant amount literally every week and one of these sparkling gems after another toppled: Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong. You name it, it was in trouble and it quickly became evident to me that China would hold the key to the endgame. I don't know why I thought that, but I felt it in my gut. That if China went the way of Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, who's to say what would stop this crisis? So, I'd been to China a few times before the late 90s, but in '97, I just was determined to bore into China and started going there every other month. And it became evident to me very, very quickly that China was cut from a totally different cloth than the rest of Asia, that it was not going to go down the road of currency devaluation, reserve depletion, going to the IMF for adjustment assistance. That China was going to stand on its own, hold the line on the currency, actually accelerate the pace of many of its reforms and use its large saving as a reservoir to stimulate counter-cyclical fiscal spending. So, I got really hooked on China, saw what they did, and I think, to this day, their actions were decisive in arresting a very powerful pan-regional contagion.</p>