China's Credit Situation Is Worse Than Greece And Spain

In an interview with Opalesque TV, Jim Chanos gave his thoughts on short selling and also added his outlook on the China macro and micro situation.
Chanos sees many short opportunities in Chinese companies for a number of reasons, including a terrible credit situation. Below are some of the transcribed quotes from his interview, with the video embedded at the bottom of the page.
On China:

• "A lot of people get the wrong impression, we are not macro people and I've stressed that we are stock people. But we came at China for exactly that reason. In the summer of 2009 we were looking at mining stocks, and we were trying to figure out why it was that in the teeth of a global recession, in mid-'09, that mining companies were reporting pretty close to record profits."
   
• "When we put our research team to work on it, by late summer and early fall, it was due to this massive property and infrastructure build up." China had 60 billion square feet in high rise construction going on, 30 billion of which was being used for for office and mixed use.
  
• "So China to us started in an examination of the global iron ore companies and has morphed into a reasonably diversified portfolio of property companies, developers, cement companies, steel companies, as well as the original iron ore minors in Australia and Brazil. And now the Chinese banks too, because as we did more and more work we discovered that the Chinese banks are the nexus for what all of this credit driven investment is flowing."
  
  

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chanos-chinas-credit-situation-is-worse-than-greece-and-spain-and-the-micro-is-even-worse-2012-7#ixzz20P5y1EP4