Arvind Subramanian

Arvind Subramanian, the author of Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China's Economic Dominance, may be the only respected economist who thinks China's GDP has already passed America.

So what does this uber bull think of the hard landing talk? Not much, he tells WSJ's China Real Time Report:

Subramanian: You need to distinguish between the short term and the long term growth. Even if China has a hard landing [soon], it has the ability to recover and get back 6.5% annual growth or so over the next 20 years [which would make China’s economy larger than the U.S].

Skeptics always point to Japan. The argument is that China’s financial system is fundamentally messed up like Japan’s, so China will go the way of Japan. But that analogy is nonsense. At the end of a financial event [that halts Chinese growth], China would still be 25% the size of the U.S. GDP. It would still have the ability to catch up to the U.S. Japan was already at the level of the U.S. [on a per capita basis when its crisis began more than 20 years ago].