中国这颗明日之星已风光不再?

I think the policymakers are doing the right thing to try to rein it in now when the economy was growing from a position of strength, and instead of letting just property prices blow up and blow up and leverage blow up, and we see what happens. But it is a risky manoeuvre obviously. Whenever you do finally address it, you could overshoot. That we don't see a lot of export growth with Europe and the United States. That's been their engine of growth. It's gonna be hard to have infrastructure investment forever when you got an airport everywhere and roads everywhere. And so it has to turn to consumption and how fast do they going to let it grow.

Well, this was the, one of the main interests of the President when he came to APEC in Singapore how the globe has to be rebalanced and how America needs to export much more to China, as everyone else does. Because the Chinese need to spend more, dip into their savings. Have you seen any evidence that China is attempting in any way to rebalance its economy away from exports?

Well, I think the US hoping to double its exports within three years and especially to China is a pipe dream. That, you know, could take a lot of things. I do think China is, you know, taking first steps. There, obviously the exchange rate flexibility, although that was mostly a master political stroke rather than a big change. They're seeing that the property, you know, had overshot. I mean prices in Shanghai were higher than New York. It doesn't make sense. And so they are taking steps. But it's another big step to really get the consumption going. I mean, in a way China has two and a half engines, and the consumption is only half an engine, and they don't know how much to rev it up.

I mean, how do you rev it up? I mean, what, how do you start?

Look, it would be easy if they felt like they could control it. You know, this repressed financial system. That would be a way giving people more credit, would certainly be a way to have more consumption. They could certainly have policies to sort of have higher wages. There're lots of ways in which wages are repressed. But...

So you say if they had the will, all the political will, they could do it much more quickly than they are.

Well, it's a question of how fast... You could do anything quickly. The question is they want stability. They don't want to move quickly. And so they are trying to move slowly and we'll see how it goes because the problem is that if export growth is weak, and there isn't room to do a lot of investment in property and infrastructure, you know, how gradually can you slow that down.

Let's just talk finally about the big picture, the global picture. We've spoken about the US, Europe, now Asia. How long do you think it will be before we get back to some sort of level of pre-crisis economic growth, sustainable economic growth, which is pretty much in line with the sort of global trend growth?

Well, I think Asia, you know, could get to trend growth, it went above trend growth, I mean, much more quickly. Europe and the United States, I mean, that's gonna be another couple of years before we've really come back, if you are talking about unemployment. I mean, we do have trend growth, the problem is that we just had a deeper recession, we are supposed to have something a lot better than trend growth to, you know, improve the unemployment so that there is not political instability.

And the unemployment problem will be a problem for how long, do you think?

Oh, at least a couple of more years, maybe, you know, three more years even. It's gonna be slow to come back.