China’s consumer inflation accelerated for the first time since August last year, caused by a burst of household spending around the Lunar New Year holiday even as deflationary pressures persist.
The consumer price index (CPI) rose 0.5 percent last month from a year earlier, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday, compared with a 0.1 percent gain in the previous month.
The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was a 0.4 percent increase.
Photo: EPA-EFE
A temporary spending boom during the eight-day break briefly masked the extent of the deflationary challenge facing the world’s second-biggest economy. The price of services increased 0.9 percent, accounting for more than 50 percent of the total rise in CPI, the statistics bureau said.
China’s factory deflation extended into a 28th month with a 2.3 percent decline, flat with the index’s contraction in December last year.
Analysts at Nomura Holdings Inc including Sonal Varma and Si Ying Toh (卓思穎) estimate that China’s CPI could have been distorted by about 0.4 percentage point last month, as some prices gained when consumers ramped up purchases ahead of the festival that ran from Jan. 28 to Tuesday last week.
The Lunar New Year is a moving holiday that fell entirely in February last year.
The health of the consumer economy is increasingly in focus for China after it exchanged the first blows in a trade war with the US. An improvement in domestic demand is urgently needed to help offset the effects of higher tariffs on exports imposed this month by US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Top Chinese officials have already pivoted to plans for more government spending and interest-rate cuts. With household wealth under strain from a yearslong property slump, they elevated boosting consumption to the top priority for economic efforts this year, only the second time that has happened in at least a decade.
The persistence of deflationary pressures in China is in stark contrast to other major economies. The worry for Beijing is that an entrenched cycle of price decreases would hold back household spending for longer and damage corporate revenues so much that it stifles investment and leads to further salary cuts and layoffs.
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
The government yesterday approved applications by Alphabet Inc’s Google to invest NT$27.08 billion (US$859.98 million) in Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The Department of Investment Review approved two investments proposed by Google, with much of the funds to be used for data processing and electronic information supply services, as well as inventory procurement businesses in the semiconductor field, the ministry said. It marks the second consecutive year that Google has applied to increase its investment in Taiwan. Google plans to infuse NT$25.34 billion into Charter Investments Ltd (特許投資顧問) through its Singapore-based subsidiary Fructan Holdings Singapore Pte Ltd, and
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
FORESEEABLE CONSEQUENCES: New technology always comes with new innovations by the iniquitous in exploiting users for financial gain or more nefarious ends Artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” say they can save users time and energy by automating tasks, but the growing power of systems such as OpenClaw is putting cybersecurity experts on edge. Powered by a wave of hype, OpenClaw today says it has more than three million users worldwide. The system allows users to create so-called agents, tools based on a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude, that can carry out online tasks. “We’ve moved from an AI you could talk with via a chatbot to an agentic AI, which can take action... the threat and the risks are
RSS