The Wall Street Journal is quick off the mark, with 5 Takeaways From China’s GDP (ungated)
1. GDP growth of 7.4% was the slowest in 24 years (i.e. since 1990)
2. The slowdown is unlikely to be a blip, and probably presages an extended deceleration of growth
3. Commodity exporters will be the biggest losers
4. Housing market…. Prices could stabilize this year, said Haibin Zhu, an economist at J.P. Morgan, but that is far from certain.
5. Economists say it is daft to get hung up on changes of a few tenths of a percentage point in the official growth rate. The statistics bureau’s methodology is “not so scientific,” as Harry Wu, a skeptic at Hitotsubashi University in Japan, puts it. And even if statisticians at the central government level are immune to political pressure, few doubt that the local bureaus underneath them are capable of fudging the numbers to produce a more flattering picture.
Still, the general trend seems to be clear. If the government says the economy is slowing down, you can bet the slowdown is real.
