Wall Street Journal (July 17)
In March, the Chinese Communist Party “set a GDP growth target range of 4.5% to 5% for the year, its most pessimistic since the 1990s.” Four months later, Beijing announced that “gross domestic product grew 4.3% year-on-year in inflation-adjusted terms in the April through June quarter.” That’s both “shockingly bad” and greatly exaggerated. “There’s accumulating evidence that the country’s true GDP growth rate may be zero, or that the economy is in outright recession.”
Tags: 1990s, Bad, CCP, Economy, Evidence, Exaggerated, GDP, Growth rate, Inflation adjusted, Pessimistic, Quarter, Target, Zero
Bloomberg (September 21)
“The value of the yen has slumped to the lowest on record, as measured against a broad basket of its peers and adjusted for inflation,” the Bank for International Settlements found based on data from 1970 onward. This serves to “underscore the pressure on the Bank of Japan to normalize its ultra-easy monetary regime, which continues to weigh down the nation’s interest rates and weaken the currency. The drop in the so-called real effective exchange rate means Japanese have to pay more for imported goods and services at a time when wage growth is failing to compensate for inflation.”
Tags: BIS, BOJ, Currency, Imports, Inflation adjusted, Interest rates, Japan, Normalize, Pressure, Real effective exchange rate, Record, Slumped, Ultra-easy, Wage growth, Yen
