Outspoken contrarian British hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry thinks the euro is finished and China is headed for a fall.

He also wishes President Barack Obama was over with as well.

“If there was a way to short Obama, I would,” Hendry told The New York Times.

Hendry runs the successful hedge fund firm Eclectica Asset Management, an old-school macroeconomic fund company. Eclectica’s flagship fund, the Eclectica Fund, is up about 13 percent this year, besting by far the average 1.3 percent loss among similar funds, the Times reported.

Like Jim Chanos, his fellow hedge fund manager stateside, Hendry believes China’s days of heady growth are about to end in crisis. He compares the country to Starbucks: good at growing quickly, not so good at creating wealth.

“The idea is that things would happen today that are commonly thought of as impossible, most notably a significant reversal of China,” he says.

During a recent trip to China, Hendry filmed himself in front of empty office buildings and giant new bridges in the middle of nowhere, both of which he says signify a credit bubble poised to burst.

Hendry is devising ways to bet on a spectacular deterioration of China’s economy, the Times reported. He declined to divulge any details.

China should boost interest rates or allow its currency to strengthen to help curb inflation pressures, the Asian Development Bank said.

China, like most Asian countries, boosted government spending and slashed lending rates last year to help spur economic growth amid a global recession. The region's policymakers are now mulling how much to ease stimulus spending and raise rates to keep their economies from overheating.

Meanwhile, others also see the euro headed for a fall. Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC said the euro’s gains are close to petering out amid fragile market confidence.

“Confidence will take a hit if European economic growth begins to fade,” Greg Gibbs, a currency strategist in Sydney, wrote in a report.

“It is hard to see confidence in European debt markets improving further from here. Perhaps the stress tests will deliver one more spurt of confidence. But it is close to a peak and so is the euro.”

Meanwhile, Obama is getting rave reviews in the District of Colombia and Hawaii, but he's not playing as well in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and West Virginia, according to newly released national poll numbers.

A Gallup survey released Monday indicates that during the first half of 2010, 85 percent of residents in the District of Columbia approved of the job Obama was doing as president, with 68 percent of Hawaiians giving him a thumbs up.

Democrats overwhelmingly dominate in Washington D.C. and they also greatly outnumber Republicans in Hawaii, the state where Obama spent much of his childhood and teenaged years.