Lai See | The dark economic thoughts of Charlene Chu

Charlene Chu, a former senior director and head of China financial institutions at the ratings agency Fitch, has been talking to Britain's about why she feels that China is on the verge of a crisis.

Chu left Fitch last year and will join US-based Autonomous Research later this year. She maintains that a banking crisis in China is not just an outside chance but a certainty. "The banking sector has extended US$14 trillion to US$15 trillion in the span of five years. There's no way that we are not going to have massive problems in China," she told the newspaper.

Her warnings have appeared particularly prescient in recent weeks with the concerns over how ICBC would resolve a 3 billion yuan (HK$3.8 billion) trust it had sold to its customers. Chu disagrees with mainland economists and academics who say the shadow banking sector and the formal banking sector are separate, and that therefore shadow banking sector does not pose a threat.

Interestingly, she feels the mainland's crisis will play out differently than in the West, where market forces have greater influence. It is post-crisis China that concerns her as she believes the main problem will not be the difficulties in bailing out the financial sector but how the country and the people deal with the inevitable slowdown in growth. "It comes down to how much of a hit does growth take and what is the impact of that on the populace and do we start to have any other issues that arise from that?" Now there's a dark thought for us all.

Stress is apparently ranked the number one lifestyle risk factor in the Asia-Pacific region. According to a survey by US professional services company Towers Watson, stress is ranked above physical inactivity and obesity by employers in the Asia-Pacific with the exception of mainland China where it is ranked second. That said, it will come as no surprise, at least to employees, that only 33 per cent of companies in the region think that improving the emotional/mental health of employees is a priority when developing health and productivity programmes. But this is considerably higher than in the US where only 15 per cent of firms consider it a priority.