South China Morning Post (August 3)
“Plummeting scores in English-language tests among Japanese lower secondary school students have triggered concern that future generations will be unable to communicate in the world’s lingua franca. In nationwide tests conducted in April, just 12.4 per cent of 15-year-olds were able to reply correctly to five spoken questions in English.”
Tags: Communicate, Concern, English, Future generations, Japan, Language, Plummeting, School, Scores, Students, Tests
Barrons (August 27)
“It has been a rough year for investors in China, especially those who forgot that it’s still a Communist nation.” Investors are fleeing in the wake of “some surprising, and very anticapitalist, moves.” The Chinese market has fallen by “20% in the past six months, while some of its biggest names have dropped more than 40%. Has China become uninvestible? No—but it has gotten a lot more complicated.”
Tags: Anticapitalist, China, Communist, Complicated, Investors, Market, Plummeting, Stocks, Surprising, Uninvestible
Bloomberg (September 2)
“If oil prices take another dramatic slide…, who wins and who loses? And could plummeting oil prices sow the seeds of the next recession?” Even in oil consuming nations, lower oil prices “come with a downside. As they work their way through the system, deflation could follow.”
Tags: Deflation, Downside, Oil, Plummeting, Prices