Back in January, in the opening session at Davos, Yu Yongding sounded a warning.
Yu also noted political risks in China: there are 150 million small Chinese stock-market investors who are going to be very angry if and when the Chinese stock-market bubble bursts. "They were hopeful that they could regain their money, and then they lost more," he said.
At that point, the Shanghai Composite had fallen to 4,700 from a peak of more than 6,000 in mid-October. Today, the index fell below 3,000. And yet, there’s precious little in the way of political fallout that I can see. Sure, there’s noise. But if any other country’s stock-market index lost half its value over the course of eight months, things would be a lot nastier than they are in China right now. Maybe a nation of gamblers understands intuitively that sometimes you lose. Or maybe it’s something to do with the fact that the stock market is still at double its levels of two years ago.