China’s economy will slow this year, prompting policymakers to reduce interest rates and loosen lending restrictions, said Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted the 2008 financial crisis.
“It’s going to be a significant growth slowdown this year,” Roubini, co-founder of Roubini Global Economics LLC, said in a Bloomberg TV interview yesterday.
“Housing is deflating. Export growth is slowing down. If they don’t do something — stimulus in monetary and fiscal credit — the risk is that the growth will slow down well below 8 percent,” he said.
China’s GDP increased 9.2 percent last year, matching the slowest pace since 2002, as the housing market cooled and the European debt crisis eroded export demand.
The central bank cut the amount banks must keep in reserve last month for the first time in three years and the government has allowed its five biggest banks to boost first-quarter lending and may relax capital requirements, people with knowledge of the matter said this week.
The world’s second-largest economy, China will further reduce the reserve-requirement ratio for banks in the first half of this year and reduce benchmark rates for the first time since 2008 to “jump start the economy,” Roubini said.
Growth below 8 percent will create “political noise” as China undergoes a leadership transition, he said.
China is in the midst of a planned shift in its ruling elite that will culminate late this year at the 18th Communist Party Congress. The meeting, which occurs every five years, will probably see Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平) tapped as China’s next president and Chinese Vice Permier Li Keqiang (李克強) put forward as premier.
Roubini, a professor at New York University, predicted the US housing bubble before the market peaked in 2006, while failing to foresee a rebound in global stocks in 2009.
Home prices fell last month in 52 of 70 Chinese cities from November, according to government data released on Wednesday. Exports increased 13.4 percent last month from a year earlier, slowing from 24.5 percent in August, according to customs bureau data.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained