Both of these links are via Paul Kedrosky.  In the video, famous shortseller Jim Chanos makes an hour long case against China. 

Then, from another site related to China finance, a smack down of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman (the China fanboy).  The piece goes into why Friedman’s claim that China’s currency reserves make it bulletproof, is refuted by two examples in history.

The idea that massive levels of reserves are a guarantor of economic stability is, in other words, based on a profound misunderstanding both of history and of the nature of reserves.  Reserves of course are not useless as an enhancer of financial stability, but their use is for very specific forms of instability.  Having large amounts of reserves relative to external claims protects countries from external debt crises and from currency crises.

Great, but neither Chanos, nor even the most pessimistic Sino-analyst, has ever said that these are the kinds of risks China faces today, any more than they were the risks faced by the US in the late 1920s or Japan in the late 1980s.  The risks that China faces today (and the US in the late 1920s and Japan in the late 1980s) is of excessive domestic liquidity having fueled asset and capacity bubbles, the latter requiring the uninterrupted ability of foreign countries to absorb via large and growing trade deficits.  These risks include an explosion in domestic government debt directly and contingently through the banking system.

These are, very typically, the kinds of risks that threaten rapidly developing large economies, unlike the external debt and currency risks that typically threaten small economies.  And reserves are almost totally useless in protecting these economies from the risks they face (and, no, no, no, reserves cannot be used to recapitalize the banks – only domestic government borrowing or direct or hidden taxes on the household sector can be used to recapitalize the banks).

In fact, it was the very process of generating massive reserves that created the risks which subsequently devastated the US and Japan. Both countries had accumulated reserves over a decade during which they experienced sharply undervalued currencies, rapid urbanization, and rapid growth in worker productivity (sound familiar?). These three factors led to large and rising trade surpluses which, when combined with capital inflows seeking advantage of the rapid economic growth, forced a too-quick expansion of domestic money and credit.

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