With China at risk of falling into a debt deflation loop, lessons from Japan's deflation journey could provide some insight.----- Transcript -----Daniel Blake: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Daniel Blake from the Morgan Stanley Asia and Emerging Market Equity Strategy Team. Laura Wang: And I'm Laura Wang, Chief China Equity Strategist. Daniel Blake: And on this special episode of the podcast, we'll discuss what lessons Japan's deflation journey can offer for China. It's Thursday, October 26th at 10 a.m. in Singapore and Hong Kong.  Daniel Blake: So in the period from 1991 to 2001, known as Japan's lost decade, Japan suffered through a prolonged economic stagnation and price deflation. While the corporate sector stopped deleveraging in the early 2000’s. It wasn't until the Abenomics program, introduced under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2013, that Japan emerged from deflation and started the process of a gradual recovery in corporate profitability. China's economic trajectory has been very different from Japan's over the last 30 years, but we now see some parallels emerging. Indeed, the risk of falling into a Japanese style stagnation is becoming more acute over the past year as a deep cyclical downturn in the property sector combines with the structural challenge that our economists call the 3D journey of debt, demographics and deflation. So, Laura, before we dig into the comparison between China and Japan's respective journeys to set the stage, can you give us a quick snapshot of where China's equity market is right now and what you expect for the rest of the year? Laura Wang: Sure, Daniel. China market has been through a quite volatile ten months so far this year with a very exciting start given the post COVID reopening. However, the strong macro momentum didn't sustain. Property sales is still falling somewhere between 30 to 50% each month on a year over year basis. And challenges from local government debt issue and early signs of deflationary pressure suggest that turn around for corporate earnings growth could still take longer to happen. We had downgraded China within the global emerging market context at the beginning of August, mainly out of these concerns, and we think more patience is needed at this point. We would like to see more meaningful easing measures to stimulate the demand and help reflate the economy, as well as clear a road map to address some of the structural issues, particularly around the local government debt problem. In contrast to China, Japan's equity market is very strong right now, and Morgan Stanley's outlook continues to be bullish from here. So, Daniel, why is it valuable to compare Japan's deflationary journey since the 1990s and China's recent challenges? What are some of the bigger similarities? Daniel Blake: I think we'll come back to the 3D's. So on the first to them, on debt we do have China's aggregate total debt around 290% of GDP. So that compares with Japan, which was about 265% of GDP back in 1990. So this is similar in the sense that we do have this aggregate debt burden sitting and needs to be managed. Secondly, on demographics, we've got a long expected but now very evident downturn in the share of the labor force that is in working age and an outright decline in working age population in China. And this is going to be a factor for many years ahead. China's birth rate or total number of births is looking to come down to around 8 million this year, compared with 28 million in 1990. And then a third would be deflation. And so we are seeing this broaden out in China, particularly the aggregate GDP level. So in Japan's case, that deflation was mainly around asset price bubbles. In China's case, we're seeing this more broadly with excess capacity in a number of industrial sectors, including new economy sectors. And then this one 4th D which is similar in both Japan's case and China now, and that's the globalization or de-risking of supply chains, as you prefer. When we're loo