Jim Chanos bearish on China and infrastructure plays

[Jim] Chanos was excited that afternoon. He had just read a report that China’s electric consumption had dropped 4 percent, despite official government statistics that the Chinese economy was growing at 8 percent. He relished the implications. “I think they’re making up the numbers!” he said. As Wall Street picks up the pieces of the broken financial system, Chanos is already one step ahead. He sees China as the next domino to fall in the global meltdown. In recent months, Chanos has loaded up short positions on the infrastructure companies that have rushed to build China’s new highways, bridges, and tunnels. Now he is waiting for their share prices to tank.

~ Gabriel Sherman, "The Catastrophe Capitalist," New York Magazine, December 7, 2008

Mary Bridges on urban congestion

The epidemic now threatening cities is traffic. Even urban centers with excellent mass transit, like Paris, are choking on cars. In 1959, economist William Vickrey urged members of Congress to charge D.C. motorists during peak hours. They declined, but Vickrey’s congestion-pricing concept eventually won acceptance—in Singapore (the first city to adopt it, in 1975); Oslo (1990); and London (2003)—and validation in Stockholm, where Vickrey was posthumously awarded the Nobel in economic science in 1996.

The New York Legislature has a March deadline to vote on a congestion-pricing plan for Manhattan being pushed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

~ Mary Bridges, "Sick Transit; Can congestion pricing save cities from auto asphyxiation?," Portfolio, March 2008