Reblog: Indian Infrastructure – A decade in the making

The global investment landscape today looks quite unexciting. Consumers in developed countries have been maxed out for the better part of a decade. Notwithstanding the recent optimism in the US, it is highly unlikely that consumption growth will reaccelerate. The best scenario one can hope for is that consumption growth settles at a 1% to 2% rate and that fears of contraction subside.

Emerging markets face a completely different problem: China. China has been the engine of growth in emerging markets for the last two decades but the Chinese engine is now sputtering. China made a miraculous transformation of its economy by building infrastructure that is the envy of even the developed world. It fueled this growth with massive amounts of debt (most of it domestic, thankfully) and by borrowing growth from the future by conspicuous overbuilding. The problem with a capital or fixed hyper-investment model is that one cannot stop. If one stops then the entire economy stalls and crashes.

China has been adding capacity in roads, railways, ports, power, steel, aluminum etc. Each of these sectors depends on the other sector’s “growth” to keep itself going. If one sector stops adding to capacity, the feedback loop stalls capacity addition in all other sectors. China has reached the point where the discourse has shifted from growth of capacities to utilization and shut down of capacities. For example, Chinese steel capacity exceeds 1 billion tonnes or about 50% of global installed steel capacity. China produces 825 million tonnes of steel. Chinese aluminum capacity exceeds 45 million Continue Reading →