Economic Overviews

Production of crude steel – ingots, semi-finished products (billets, blooms, slabs), and liquid steel for castings – soared globally, and spiked in the U.S., but fell in China for the first time in years, and China’s share of global crude steel production, after soaring for years...

I notice that any article I post on my site regarding economic, financial and investing topics related to China get a lot of page views from Chinese readers suggesting that Chinese nationals are anxious to read what Western commentators have to say about their country. Here are some of those articles you might have missed.

This article focuses on five myths about China’s economy and its financial system with my hope that offering more realistic assessments will help investors better judge the opportunities and risks of investing in China.

My business partner is working in China and corresponds with me regularly as to what is happening there with the COVID-19 resurgence and the impact the country's zero-COVID policy is having on its citizens and its economy.

[This article takes] a look at the state of the U.S. economy by assessing the tightness of the "economic screws" (i.e. the key economic metrics) that hold the economy together [and concludes that, despite the slowing growth rate of the economy, the majority of the important economic screws remain tight enough to prevent a recession and to keep the stock market from falling into a bear market. [Let me explain.] 

China has mandated a strict “zero COVID” policy since the onset of the global pandemic, which has led to tight lockdowns across the country whenever cases have started to spike and these cautionary measures have had far-reaching impacts on China’s economy, especially on its supply chain and logistics operations.

The global economy is perched on the edge of an abyss, and averting our gaze doesn’t actually lessen the risk, it increases it because problems which aren’t faced directly and addressed directly fester and rot the system from within.

Every few years, the World Bank takes on the task of measuring the world's wealth that include endowments of nature, ranging from wilderness to oil wells, as well as the human capital embodied in the education and skills of its people, in addition to the more traditional measurement of based on the value of houses, or the stock market, or retirement accounts.

In response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and EU have imposed heavy sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy. However, these bold actions also come with some potentially messy complications:

Commodities everywhere have soared in price - oil, gas, base metals, precious metals, and grains and as well fertilizers - and these high costs, along with higher costs for just about everything else, are squeezing disposable incomes and that in turn could lead to a recession.