China’s lending policy could trigger debt crisis, says Olaf Scholz

BERLIN (Reuters) – Lack of transparency in China’s lending poses a threat to developing and emerging countries and could trigger a new debt crisis, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Friday.

“There’s a really serious danger that the next big debt crisis in the South will come from loans that China has been making around the world that they don’t quite keep track of, because there’s so much actors involved”, declared Olaf Scholz during a debate on the occasion of the German Catholic Day, in Stuttgart.

“It would then plunge both China and the South into a major economic and financial crisis and would not leave the rest of the world indifferent – to put it politely.”

(Report Miranda Murray and Kirsti Knolle; French version Augustin Turpin, edited by Sophie Louet)