China undergoing hard-landing, Fed will not raise rates again, Soros says
China’s economy was already experiencing a ‘hard landing’, billionaire investor George Soros said on Friday in remarks to Bloomberg TV.
Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Soros said that scenario was “practically unavoidable”.
"I’m not expecting it, I’m observing it,” he said.
The investor, who said he had been ‘shorting’ the S&P 500 and betting against commodity exporting countries and Asian currencies, said China’s hard landing would worsen deflationary forces across the globe.
Soros’s main claim to fame was his gambit in 1992 to force the United Kingdom to devalue the pound, forcing it out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
That netted him £1bn in profits.
Nonetheless, in 2011 Soros also said the Greece-induced European debt crunch was more serious the crisis of 2008.
In the opinion of Soros, China’s economy is in fact now expanding at a rate closer to 3.5% and its levels od debt were unsustainable.
For him, the US Federal Reserve would not raise rates again in 2016 and should not have done so in December 2015.