The Week (January 6)
“For the Chinese stock markets, it was not a happy New Year.” The initial drops in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Composites were “an unwelcome reminder of two precipitous crashes that befell China’s stock market midway through 2015.” Things have leveled off and it’s true that “the performance of any country’s stock market has only a tangential relationship to the performance of its real economy.”Nevertheless, “the situation for China’s real economy isn’t exactly good.”
Tags: 2016, China, Real economy, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Stock markets
The Economist (March 16)
America’s “debt is rising, its population is ageing in a budget-threatening way, its schools are mediocre by international standards, its infrastructure rickety, its regulations dense, its tax code byzantine, its immigration system hare-brained—and it has fallen from first position in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings to seventh in just four years.” But “dysfunction in Washington is only one side of America’s story…. There is also another America, where things work.” The successful side of America can be seen in the improving performance of the real economy where “businesses and politicians are not waiting for the federal government to ride to their rescue.”
Tags: Businesses, Debt, Dysfunction, Government, Population, Real economy, Regulations, U.S., WEF
