China did not grow over 5% in 2015

[luisvieira]

This statement was made by Brazilian economist, Roberto Dumas Damas, who is an author of a book on the Chinese economy, in an interview to financial portal InfoMoney. He explained that it is an "absurd" that an economy grew by 7% when the services sector accounted for just 50.5% of the total GDP and grew by just 6.9%, while energy consumption declined 0.2%. Damas also said that this is a problem specially for the economies depending on hard commodities (case of Chile, Australia, South Africa and Colombia), but not a reason to panic. His forecast is that China will grow between 2.5% and 5% in 2016. On the other hand, he says that markets did not precify this smaller numbers.

What do you say?

[WCMO]

I'm definitely no expert, but from all that I read here and elsewhere, I don't think anyone actually trusts the numbers put out from China.  On the other hand, so long as their growth rate is above zero, then their economy is not actually shrinking.

[BA Deere]

This is just what I`ve heard, but since China was in a obvious bubble, it had to go down at some point..it just grew too fast.  They put their money in ghost towns, stock piled grain, bought US scrap iron.  But this 5% growth, even if it`s fudged a little they are still growing like the US hasn`t seen since the Industrial Revolution.  They got rid of their "one child" policy, some say they`d like to have the Renminbi as the world reserve currency. 

But I really don`t know.

[hardnox]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12150909/This-is-a-global-stock-market-rout-worth-celeb...

The link above, an interesting take. Relatively optimistic.

I can't know the extent of Chinese problems or how well they'll work through them.

The current financial crisis emanates from China more than anywhere but the thing that keeps me awake at night is The Big Dog- the USA- and a potential crisis in politics and the social mood.

Which will no doubt just open the gates for everyone to inveigh about what they're POed about.