Chinese GDP Growth: Now and Near Future

I’ve noticed a tendency for some commentators to believe the Chinese economy is about to topple. One such instance is Gordon Chang writing in the National Interest:

Take the year 2016 as an example. The NBS reported that China’s gross domestic product grew 6.7 percent that year. In 2017, however, the World Bank issued a bar chart showing that China’s GDP increased only 1.1 percent

One has to wonder why in 2019 Chang is citing an unspecified 2017 World Bank report regarding 2016 performance. Well, time to — gasp — look at the data.

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The Data Will Make You Free

I am constantly amazed that people write stuff that is easily falsifiable, in an era of easily accessible databases (I am tempted to go into an old fogey rant about “in my day I had to go to the library and hand copy down numbers from the hard copy volumes of International Financial Statistics”…but I will resist). Or ask me for the “raw” data when it’s freely available.

Just to remind the frequent commenters on this blog, there exist freely available data here:

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Libra: economics of Facebook’s cryptocurrency

Facebook last week announced plans for Libra, a new global cryptocurrency. The name seems to be a marriage of the words “livre”, the French currency throughout the Middle Ages based on a pound of silver, and “liber,” which is Latin for “free.” Facebook claims that Libra will give the freedom to easily transmit funds across borders to the 1.7 billion adults in the world without access to traditional banks.
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37 Years Ago Today: “It’s because of you little motherf*****s that we’re out of work!”

On this day, in 1982,  at the height of the hysteria focused on competition from Japan, two unemployed auto workers chased down Vincent Chin — celebrating his bachelor’s party — and beat him senseless with a baseball bat (he subsequently died from his injuries). As we re-establish Camp Sill as an internment/detention/concentration camp (you pick the term), and the deportation campaign — real or imagined — is announced, it’s perhaps time to recall the warning signs:

In context:

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Recession Indicators, June 21

Industrial production, personal income ex-transfers, and Macroeconomic Advisers’ monthly GDP are all below recent peak; manufacturing and trade industry sales and nonfarm payroll employment are still rising (although barely, in the latter case). Here’s a graph of these five indicators.

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