China needs to be more aggressive in its reforms if it wants to smoothly transition from an export-oriented economy to a services-driven one, the head of BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, said on Tuesday. "China is struggling with excessive leverage within a lot of financial institutions," BlackRock Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink said at a BlackRock forum in Hong Kong. "They need to be more aggressive in their reforms. Reforms are slower than what I would have preferred." He added there are still too many state-owned enterprises in China and that the recent "explosion in credit" is "the wrong way to reorient the economy". Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.
BlackRock's Laurence D Fink, who oversees the world’s largest money manager with $4.7tn of client assets, has joined others in warning that we should all be concerned about US's mounting debt pile. While he says he is still bullish regarding the long-term prospects of US, current slowing growth and increasing debt are large threats to the outlook. As we previously noted, George Soros warned that the country's debt-fueled economy was beginning to resemble the China in 2007 and 2008.