China’s slowdown stabilized last month in the wake of monetary stimulus and a loosening of fiscal restrictions on indebted local governments.
Growth in industrial output and credit accelerated, helping offset a further drop in the pace for fixed-asset investments, which includes property construction, coal plants and infrastructure projects.
Bloomberg’s monthly GDP tracker advanced the most since January, narrowing the gap with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s (李克強) expansion target of about 7 percent for the year.
Along with strong jobs gains in the US and improving readings from Japan, stabilization in China bolsters a global outlook that is clouded by uncertainty in Europe. The steadier economic report card gives Li more time to assess the impact of monetary easing and a debt-swap deal to help local governments.
“The economy was bottoming in May,” Hong Kong-based UBS Group AG chief China economist Wang Tao (王濤) said. “We won’t see a strong rebound, but we will see a slight improvement in the third quarter, as all kinds of stabilizing measures intensify.”
Industrial output rose 6.1 last month from a year earlier, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday, accelerating from 5.9 percent in April and beating the median estimate of 6 percent in a Bloomberg survey.
Retail sales added 10.1 percent last month, while fixed-asset investment excluding rural households climbed 11.4 percent in the first five months.
Aggregate financing, including bank loans and off-balance credit, was 1.22 trillion yuan (US$197 billion), the People’s Bank of China said. That compares with the median estimate of 1.13 trillion yuan in a Bloomberg survey.
New yuan loans were 900.8 billion yuan.
Bloomberg’s monthly GDP tracker, a weighted average of monthly economic indicators, climbed to 6.55 percent year-on- year last month from 6.4 percent in April.
“While the urgency of policy easing is reduced, we continue to believe more is required,” Bloomberg economist Tom Orlik wrote.
“We put a high probability on a further rate cut in the third quarter. More targeted measures to support local government infrastructure and social housing projects seem assured,” Orlik said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group