China’s economic miracle is over

[McFurd]

MarketWatch - 3/10/2017 - George Friedman - In 2016, China’s growth rate was the lowest it had been since 1990. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has since told the National People’s Congress that China’s GDP growth rate would drop to 6.5% this year from 7% in 2016. The precision with which any country’s economic growth is measured is dubious, since it is challenging to measure the economic activity of hundreds of millions of people and businesses. But the reliability of China’s economic numbers has always been taken with a larger grain of salt than in most countries. We suspect the truth is that China’s economy is growing less than 6.5% — if at all. The important part of Li’s announcement is that the Chinese government is signaling that it has not halted a decline in the Chinese economy, and that more economic pain is on the way. According to the BBC, Li said the Chinese economy’s ongoing transformation is promising, but it is also painful. He likened the Chinese economy to a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. Put another way, the hard times in China likely will become worse. Read more @ http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas ... 2017-03-10