Watch your wallets

Once the China baloney reaches this sort of fever pitch, it is time to head for the hills. I think quite a lot of what appears in Red Herring is good, interesting stuff, but this piece from the web site has the feeling of the back end of a bubble:

"The upside is enormous if China gets it policies right, with some ...going so far as to say that Shenzhen's market capitalization could be greater than the Nasdaq by 2013, and Intel could be taken over by a Chinese company within roughly the same time frame."

Cast your mind back 15-20 years and this is the sort of stuff people were writing about Japan.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not China basher. I've been working here for 20 years and continue to see exciting and enormous potential in the market. But the 'swingometer' of business opinion is way out on the extremes of optimism right now and there are going to be some disappointed people.

Bill Clinton, speaking at the China Internet Summit, appears to have joined the sceptics according to another Red Herring piece.

“I don’t think you can continue to grow at 9 percent forever in a fundamentally imbalanced system which requires you to buy enormous amounts of America’s debt every day so that we keep the value of the dollar up and interest rates low, so we can continue to buy your products,” Clinton is reported to have said.