About self -confidence

He gave journalism for about 15 years, of which he worked in Bloomberg, of which four were the chief of the Moscow Bureau. He was immersed in the perturbation of the markets - from oil to Palladium, talked with the whales of the industry - from Khodorkovsky and Mebius to Lord Brown and Nicky Oppenheimer. He peered into the world of the economy so carefully that he eventually failed inside: in 2005 he went to work in Standard & Poor's, in 2006-in JPMorgan. He graduated from Moscow State University twice, once (with a degree of MBA) - Oxford. Now he is engaged in the management of private capital in Geneva. About the author of China and India do not just show steady growth in the middle of the global crisis. There is no less than the return of these civilizations to world leadership. They have always been leading - with the exception, however, the last 200 years, but this (on a scale of history) is a short -term deviation, and now everything is returning to the normal state of affairs. Such is the short summary of the speeches of Kishor Mabuban, dean of the Singapore school of state policy, at the Troika Dialog investment forum last week in Moscow.

Mr. Mabuban is a prolific author. Recently, I have come across at least half a dozen of his articles more or less on the same topic - about how Asian successes prove the limitations of Western recipes and systems. So his radical reasoning in Moscow was not such a surprise.

But it is noteworthy how much it sounds in the Mainstream. Around Mabuban, the constellation of Western economists was sitting-from the New York Exchange Guru Nuriel Rubini to the Nobel laureate Edmund Felps. All of them exuded pessimism about Western economies. The famous Anders Oslund even called Europe "the greatest mediocrity in the world in the economic sense."

A week earlier, in Davos, the discussions took shape in about the same channel. American and European participants blamed their countries on the inefficiency of the political system, putting the dynamism and determination of China as an example.

At the same time, Americans and Europeans praise Asia not at all for what that, at least publicly, wants to be proud of. In the West, where Keynes (and sometimes Marx) is called again in fashion, China is called an example of successful hospitalism. Mabuban, who echoing at the commentary of Chinese and Indian colleagues, said literally the following: “The West loses confidence in market institutions. Asia, on the contrary, trusts them more and more. Look, who is now more protecting freedom of trade, and who resorts to protectionism? ”

It is clear that both of them are crooked in their own interests. The success of China can hardly be attributed to state intervention, since the main achievements appeared exactly there and then where the state retreated and gave more maneuver to the private trader. However, the significant components of the current Chinese growth - holding a cheap yuan, stimulating internal demand and artificial separation of the labor market - can also not be called a market approach. This is if you do not ask the main question - about the stability of Asian growth. So far, the total consumption of China and India is only a fifth of the American. And how long will the “return of ancient civilizations to leadership” last, if the Americans cannot afford to buy Chinese again in their previous volumes?

But it’s not even about how justified the slogans of the Singapore political scientist or a complaint of his Western colleagues are. I wonder how everything has changed. Who now teaches to live. And what reasons to whom does it lead. One of the obvious consequences of the economic crisis is mental: the clear crisis of the confidence of America and Europe in itself. Participants in recent conferences in China say that there, houses, local economists, politicians and businessmen are much more modest than Mr. Mabuban in Moscow. But it is known that a holy place is not empty. And this also applies to the spirit of leadership.

The author’s opinion may not coincide with the position of the editors of gzt.ru