{"id":310786,"date":"2017-06-01T10:02:51","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T09:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-greatest-financial-bubble-in-history\/"},"modified":"2017-06-01T10:02:51","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T09:02:51","slug":"the-greatest-financial-bubble-in-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-greatest-financial-bubble-in-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greatest Financial Bubble In History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James Rickards<\/strong>
The Daily Reckoning<\/a>
May 31, 2017<\/p>\n

China is in the greatest financial bubble in history.\u00a0Yet, calling China a bubble does not do justice to the situation. This story has been touched on periodically over the last year.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

China has multiple bubbles, and they\u2019re all getting ready to burst.\u00a0<\/strong>If you make the right moves now, you could be well positioned even as Chinese credit and currency crash and burn<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The first and most obvious bubble is credit. The combined Chinese government and corporate debt-to-equity ratio is over 300-to-1 after hidden liabilities, such as provincial guarantees and shadow banking system liabilities, are taken into account.<\/p>\n

Paying off that debt requires growth, but the growth itself is fueled by more debt. China is now at the point where enormous new debt is required to achieve only modest new growth. This is clearly non-sustainable.<\/p>\n

The next bubble is in investment instruments called Wealth Management Products, or WMPs. You may remember hearing about in the\u00a0Daily Reckoning<\/a>\u00a0and also covered in Bloomberg\u2019s article\u00a0China Is Playing a $9 Trillion Game of Chicken With Savers<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Picture this. You\u2019re a middle-class Chinese saver and you walk into a bank. They offer you two investment options. The first is a bank deposit that pays about 2%. The other is a WMP that pays about 7%. Which do you choose?<\/em><\/p>\n

In the past ten years, bank customers have chosen almost $12 trillion of WMPs.\u00a0<\/strong>That might be fine if WMPs were like high-quality corporate or municipal bonds. They\u2019re not. They\u2019re more like the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.<\/p>\n