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Fast Growth and Inflation Threaten to Overheat Chinese Economy
This is the predicament China finds itself in today: Fast growth has fired up the country’s economic engines, but it has also led to stubbornly high inflation, which threatens to overheat the economy and undermine the long-running boom that the country has experienced.
The latest evidence of this came Friday when China said its economy had grown 9.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, certainly the strongest performance among the world’s biggest economies. But the government also said that in March the consumer price index had risen 5.4 percent from the level of a year earlier, the sharpest increase in 32 months.
Analysts were not surprised by the figures, but some experts say they believe they may understate the real rate of growth and inflationary pressure. Bank lending, for instance, picked up strongly last month, and food, energy and raw material prices have risen sharply this year. In March alone, the government said, food prices rose 11.7 percent.For Many Chinese Men, No Deed Means No Dates
But by the exacting standards of single Chinese women, it seems, Mr. Wang lacks that bankable attribute known as real property. Given that even a cramped, two-bedroom apartment on the dusty fringe of the capital sells for about $150,000, Mr. Wang’s $900-a-month salary means he may forever be condemned to the ranks of the renting.
Last year, he said, this deficiency prompted a high-end dating agency to reject his application. In recent months, half a dozen women have turned down a second meeting after learning that he had no means to buy a home.
“Sometimes I wonder if I will ever find a wife,” said Mr. Wang, who lives with his parents, retired factory workers who remind him of his single status with nagging regularity. “I feel like a loser."
There have been many undesirable repercussions of China’s unrelenting real estate boom, which has driven prices up by 140 percent nationwide since 2007, and by as much as 800 percent in Beijing over the past eight years. Working-class buyers have been frozen out of the market while an estimated 65 million apartments across the country bought as speculative investments sit empty.Has the Communist Party Abandoned Reform?
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What China Will Really Do With Its $3 Trillion In Reserves
China’s foreign-exchange reserves exceeded $3 trillion for the first time, highlighting global imbalances that Group of 20 finance chiefs aim to tackle at meetings in Washington.
China’s currency holdings, the world’s biggest, swelled by $197 billion in the first quarter to $3.04 trillion, the central bank said yesterday. New loans were a more-than-estimated 679.4 billion yuan ($104 billion) in March, it said.
Premier Wen Jiabao’s policy of controlling the currency, along with trade surpluses and flows of capital into the fastest-growing major economy, have boosted the reserves by $1 trillion in two years.
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