What About China?

Stephen Roach says not to worry, they've got things under control (h/t Mark Thoma):

China’s economy is slowing. This is no surprise for an export-led economy dependent on faltering global demand. But China’s looming slowdown is likely to be both manageable and welcome. Fears of a hard landing are overblown. To be sure, the economic data have softened. Purchasing managers’ indices are now threatening the “50” threshold, which has long been associated with the break-even point between expansion and contraction. Similar downtrends are evident in a broad array of leading indicators, ranging from consumer expectations, money supply, and the stock market, to steel production, industrial product sales, and newly started construction.
But this is not 2008. Back then, global commerce was collapsing, presaging a 10.7% drop in the volume of world trade in 2009 – the sharpest annual contraction since the 1930s. In response, China’s export performance swung from 26% annual growth in July 2008 to a 27% contraction by February 2009. Sequential GDP growth slowed to a low single-digit pace – a virtual standstill by Chinese standards. And more than 20 million migrant workers reportedly lost their jobs in export-led Guangdong province. By late 2008, China was in the throes of the functional equivalent of a full-blown recession.

I would assume China will have some type of collapse in the not-too-distant future, but maybe not.  His explanations seem reasonable, and I have no insight into the market.  Maybe it is like folks in Britain might have expected the U.S. to stumble throughout the fifties and sixties, because the growth was too fast.  Anyway, a soft landing in China might prevent an even worse financial crisis when Europe and the U.S. grapple with our debt-induced double dip, and it will have to ease things in Australia.