The Wall Street Journal once dubbed Charlene Chu the "rock star" of Chinese debt analysis. As an analyst at Fitch Ratings, her work was widely followed, particularly when she began warning about risks in China's banking sector, even though the economy was booming.Here is another Q&A she did some years ago with The Wall Street Journal. Chu, who earned an M.A. in international relations and an MBA at Yale, left Fitch to work on her cousin's memoir about her life in rural China and then joined Autonomous Research, now a division of Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Her research reports for Autonomous are must-reads for those tracking China's economic development and its financial sector. What follows is an edited transcript of our discussion.
Charlene Chu Illustration by Kate Copeland
A decade ago, even as China’s economy was booming, you highlighted something few analysts talked about at the time: the massive accumulation of debt that corporations and local governments had