China needs $5tr to save its economy

Beijing. At this point, it’s pretty much consensus that it’s going to take some doing to get China’s economy back on track.

The country is dealing with a falling currency, an incredibly volatile stock market, and thinning corporate margins in sectors that used to drive the country’s growth.

These are huge structural problems that will require both brilliance and cold hard cash to solve. The question is, how much?

According to Charlene Chu of Autonomous Research, who is widely considered one of the best (if not the best) China analyst in the world, it’s going to take more money than you could possibly imagine.

“Larger credit injections are possible, but we would need to see CNY37.5trn in net new credit in 2016 to achieve the same magnitude credit impulse as in 2009,” Chu wrote in an email to Business Insider.

That is $5.7 trillion. $5.7 trillion!

Those numbers are based on her firm’s internal calculation of China’s Total Social Financing (TSF), a metric the government developed to track how much money is flowing through the economy.

This is obviously a huge bazooka the government would have to pull out, but the stimulus measures the government has been applying over the last year and half or so aren’t really doing the job. (AFP)