Lower Inflation Expands Scope For More Interest Rate Cuts

The significance of the latest monthly inflation figures (down to 2.4% in November) is not so much that they show how rapidly the economy is slowing — there have been plenty of signs of that already — but that they restore real interest rates. That makes more cuts in nominal rates before year’s end a [...]

July Inflation Figures Distract From Strength Of Trade

Chinese stocks may have taken a nosedive following the latest monthly wholesale inflation figures that were the highest in a decade at 10% (9.1% was the forecast), but investors should have been paying greater attention to the trade numbers. Both exports and imports in July beat forecasts, regardless of a slowing global economy and anaemic [...]

Economy Grew Briskly In Q1, Inflation Still Too High

The severe winter in the south, inflation dampening measures nationwide and the credit crunch worldwide haven’t put much of a brake on growth. First quarter GDP rose by 10.6%, down from 11.2% in the same quarter a year earlier but brisk enough for all that.
Suggests that efforts to rein in lending and inflation are having [...]

Inflation More Than Washington Behind Yuan’s Rise Against Dollar

When U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrives in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese currency might coincidental break through the symbolic seven to the dollar level. As Richard McGregor writes in the FT “the currency has become a litmus test of Chinese responsiveness to U.S. complaints on trade.”
Yet what really is driving the recent strengthening of [...]

Higher Yuan Signaled

Another signal from the central bank that it will let the yuan rise faster this year to stimulate domestic demand as part of its fight on inflation, now at an 11-year high.
The Peoples Bank of China’s latest monetary policy report says currency appreciation will play a bigger part in a push to tighten monetary policy, [...]

Rising Prices. Rising Yuan?

The latest monthly inflation figures showing a 7.1% rise in consumer prices in January, the biggest increase in 11 years, are little surprise given the transport bottlenecks and food shortages caused by the severe winter in the south and west of the country. The question is, how long it will take for their impact to [...]

Snowed Under On The Farm

The return of snow and ice to southwestern Yunnan province, leaving clean-up crews struggling to cope with more blackouts, disrupted transport and stranded travelers, highlights both the fragility of China’s material infrastructure and the remarkable depth of its human resources to respond to a civil emergency on such a scale.
Meanwhile, the snow alert has been [...]

Hamster Prices Triple In China

The smile-inducing headline above comes from the BBC which uses it on a rewrite of a Xinhua story about hamsters becoming the must-have pet in the Year of the Rat.
In the Year of the Rat, this tiny creature has become the most acceptable rodent, a type of animal that is not everyone’s first-choice pet.
“Rats and [...]

Control Failure

It has been two decades since China started to scrap price controls on food and consumer goods, a process given a sharp shove forward in 2001 by China joining the World Trade Organization.
Now the State Council has reimposed some as part of its effort to dampen inflation. The new controls are vague: enterprises producing general [...]

Young, Restless & Unemployed

It is not so much the news that rising food and property prices are causing discontent among China’s urban poor as the fact that it is being publicly admitted to. The rare admission comes from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which has been taking the pulse of daily life since the early 1990s, if [...]