Is It Time to Short HSBC Stock?

That's what readers of an NYT column by Stephen D. King, the chief economist at HSBC, must be wondering. The piece, perversely titled "When Wealth Disappears," tries to construct a story of gloom and doom out of King's own confusion about economics.

The basic point seems to be that we have to adjust to a period of slower growth based on his claim that the growth of the period from the end of World War II until the end of the last century was an anomaly. To start with, the period of strong gro...