China's wise men come down to earth with a bump
It matters a lot that the country's leaders might be mere mortals, because the economic transition they are trying to engineer is super-human
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CHINA invented the compass. Yet in a curious irony, the direction of the world's second-largest economy has become more or less unreadable. The country's GDP increased by 6.9 percent in the third quarter, the slowest rate in six years. What investors, corporate chieftains and others really want to know, though, is how well China will manage an alarming slowdown. The signs aren't terribly encouraging.
The smog of uncertainty descended this summer. A collapse of the Shanghai stock market spooked foreign investors, even though they have almost no exposure to it. Even the surprise devaluation of the currency by 2 per cent against the US dollar on Aug 11 should not have caused too much upset. In real trade-weighted terms, it is still almost 12 per cent stronger than a year earlier.
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