Topic: Andy Xie

Andy Xie (谢国忠) (born 1962) is an independent economist based in Shanghai, and the former Morgan Stanley star chief Asia-Pacific economist famous for his contrarian and provocative views . He left Morgan Stanley abruptly in October 2006 when an internal email that he penned was leaked out. He derided Singapore as a money laundering centre for Indonesia, and the ASEAN group of nations as a failure. The leakage lead to subsequent resignations of Singapore-based Celicia Ong and Hong Kong-based Hani Abuali.

Andy Xie graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a M.S. in Civil Engineering. He then obtained a PhD in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990 and went on to become an economist for IMF, specialising in South-east Asian economies. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1997 as a Managing Director, and is noted for his provocative views on the Chinese economy. His bearish calls on Shanghai property and Chinese stock market have attracted criticism from Chinese officials. In China, some local government economists criticized his bearish calls on Chinese Asset Bubble-Burst Cycle and questioned his personality, claiming him as an "American Parrot".

Andy Xie is one of the few economists who accurately predicted economic bubbles including the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, dot-com bubble (1999) and Subprime mortgage crisis (2008). Andy Xie considers himself as one who has had a reasonably good record at calling bubbles in the past. "I wrote my doctoral thesis arguing that Japan was a bubble in late 1980s, a long report at the World Bank in the early 1990s arguing that Southeast Asia was a bubble, research notes at Morgan Stanley in 1999 calling dotcom boom a bubble, and numerous research notes from 2003 onwards arguing that the US property market was a bubble. On the other hand I have never called something a bubble that turned out not to be a bubble."