carnegieendowment.org /people/michael-pettis
Michael Pettis
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carnegieendowment.org /people/michael-pettis
Michael Pettis
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Experts
Experts
Nonresident Senior Fellow, Carnegie China
Michael Pettis is a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An expert on China’s economy, Pettis is professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets.
From 2002 to 2004, he also taught at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and, from 1992 to 2001, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the Institute of Latin American Studies Advisory Board at Columbia University as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at the School of Public and International Affairs.
Pettis worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the sovereign debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JPMorgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was managing director principal heading the Latin American capital markets and the liability management groups. 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.
In addition to trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.
He formerly served as a member of the Board of Directors of ABC-CA Fund Management Company, a Sino–French joint venture based in Shanghai. He is the author of several books, including The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2013).



Economists have drawn the wrong lessons from the failures of the 1930s.
If China’s average consumption growth rate is indeed 3–4 percent over the next five to ten years, that must also be the upper limit of China’s GDP growth rate.
Rather than treat tariffs as a species of evil that must always be resisted, economists should instead debate the conditions under which they are likely to be harmful versus those under which they are likely to be beneficial.
Sophia Besch sits down with Michael Pettis to talk about the failures of our modern global trading system and how to fix them.
Sophia Besch sits down with Michael Pettis to talk about the failures of our modern global trading system and how to fix them.
Trade never clears incrementally. It only clears systemically, and external imbalances are always, and must always be, perfectly consistent with internal imbalances.