What a Decline in China Will Mean for the World

China has driven GDP based on heavy capital investment. When, at some point, that ends, and China's GDP growth falls dramatically, what will happen to the rest of the world?

Not that much, argues Michael Pettis. Pettis is a leading thinker on international trade and investment flows. He is currently a nonresident senior fellow in the Carnegie Asia Program, based in Beijing, and also professor of finance at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. He formerly taught at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and before that at Columbia University. He spent the first half of his career on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance, working with Manufacturers Hanover (now JPMorgan) and Bear Stearns. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant-banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team.