Chinese importers are applying to their government to lift tariffs on some US agricultural imports, state media reported on Sunday (Jul 21), three weeks after the two sides reached a truce in their trade war. The unnamed importers were talking to US suppliers about potential pricing and have applied to a Chinese government body with oversight of tariffs to lift the levies, the nearly identical reports in various media outlets said. The importers were acting “according to the needs of the domestic market,” the reports said. No further details were ...

The European Union is legendary for moving slowly — and that may be just the right pace for confronting President Donald Trump’s trade wars. While the daunting threat of U.S. tariffs on Europe’s auto industry and other measures is very much alive, one line of thinking in the EU is that Trump will be less trigger-happy the closer he gets to the 2020 election. The logic is that he’d risk a voter backlash if the EU retaliated by targeting U.S. exports, notably farm products. Right now, the awkward EU-U.S. truce ...

Despite external instabilities and domestic downside risks, the Chinese economy is likely to record a steady full-year GDP growth of 6.2 percent or higher in 2019, with policy measures at the ready to combat any challenges, economists said. China announced 11 measures on Saturday to further open up the financial sector in the latest move to help bolster and stabilize growth. The country will allow foreign institutions to conduct credit rating business with all types of bonds in China’s interbank and exchange bond markets, said the State Council’s Office of ...

South Korea’s exports, a bellwether for global trade, appear set for an eighth straight monthly decline as trade disputes take a toll on global demand. Exports during the first 20 days of July fell 14% from a year earlier, data from the Korea Customs Service showed Monday. Semiconductor sales plunged 30%, while shipments to China, the biggest buyer of South Korean goods, fell 19%. The early July data come after Asia’s fourth-largest economy, which relies on exports to generate growth, saw overseas shipments fall in June by the most in ...

China is to see 46 million jobs concerning project management generated by 2027, Monday’s China Daily reported. Such massive job creation will be due to the country’s demand for high-quality development and the Belt and Road Initiative, Sunil Prashara, president of the Project Management Institute (PMI) in Pennsylvania, U.S., was quoted as saying. An average of 1.1 million jobs will be sought to be filled each year in the project-oriented industries within China, and a total number of 11 millions jobs are likely to be opened between 2017 and 2027, ...

No big news that China’s economy is the slowest it has been in decades. It had to slow, just the way Japan’s economy doubled every ten years from the ashes of World War II to become the second largest in the world, and then crashed in 1990 starting Japan’s “Lost Decade” (the Nikkei crashed more than 80%). China’s economy has been growing much faster than that, and even if you cut their reported GDP numbers in half, which one World Bank analysis said was appropriate—see my Forbes column from last ...

Some conservative House Republicans are asking President Trump to reject any agreement to set new spending levels and increase the government’s borrowing limit without significant spending cuts, injecting further uncertainty into negotiations toward a deal this week. Rep. Mike Johnson (R., La.), the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, a group of around 150 conservative Republicans, spoke with President Trump on Saturday about his concerns with the still-developing budget agreement. “We believe the White House and congressional leadership should be prepared to walk away from this if necessary,” Mr. ...

Trade between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has great potential in growth to boost world economy, which faces challenges and uncertainties, said Wichai Kinchong Choi, senior vice president of Thailand’s Kasikorn Bank. ASEAN became China’s second-largest trading partner in the first half of 2019, overtaking the United States for the first time since 1997. China’s customs data showed that China’s trade with ASEAN rose 10.5 percent to 1.98 trillion yuan (288 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of this year, as China’s trade with the ...

Tourists coming to Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, now have a unique destination on their list of must-see attractions: a 20th-century design cruise ship on the Yangtze River with four decks and 98 cabins, where a drama set in 1920s Wuhan is performed. Paying about 200 yuan (about 29 U.S. dollars) for a ticket, tourists can go aboard the ship Zhiyin Hao at around 7:30 p.m. and immerse themselves in the drama where performers wear vintage clothing. As Wuhan’s flagship night tour program, the cruise has attracted a total of ...

Emitting a quiet hum, 22 Kuka robots move their “arms” on a production line, transporting, assembling, loading, inspecting and packaging goods. Only about 10 people monitor the orange automatons. Welcome to the smart factory of Midea Group in the Nansha Economic and Technological Development Zone in southern Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. The machines have replaced 22 types of jobs on the production line, which produces high-end air conditioners for Midea. Sixty-five percent of the factory’s air conditioner production lines have been automated, and monthly output has doubled from about ...

Two months after China shocked investors with the first government seizure of a bank in two decades, market confidence in the nation’s smaller lenders has yet to fully recover. That may be just what the country needs. When it took control of Baoshang Bank Co. on May 24 and imposed losses on some creditors, China’s government upended the long-held assumption that it would always provide banks with a 100% backstop. The result has been a wholesale repricing of risk for all but the largest Chinese lenders, a development that analysts ...

Japan stands ready to take all possible steps flexibly and without hesitation when downside risks to the economy emerge, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, as a simmering Sino-U.S. trade war clouds the outlook for the export-reliant economy. Speaking on Monday after his ruling coalition kept a solid majority in upper house elections, Abe pledged to continue to make the economy his top priority, to put a decisive end to roughly two decades of deflation. China’s slowing economy, its trade war with the United States and spreading protectionism have led to ...

EU banks should press ahead with preparations for Britain’s departure from the European Union despite Brexit being postponed to October, the head of the euro zone’s banks resolution board said on Monday. “My message is there is no reason to postpone. Get prepared, be organised,” Elke Koenig told the European Parliament. Source: Reuters (Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

The total profits of the most profitable 500 Chinese companies reached about 4.43 trillion yuan in 2018, with a year-on-year growth rate of 11 percent, which was equivalent to 95 percent of the total profits (about 4.68 trillion yuan) of all listed companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, according to this year’s China Business Top 100 Company List, or the CBT100 list, which has been released by the Shanghai-based Warton Economic Institute annually since 2001. The top 500 companies’ revenues in 2018 totalled more than ...

Economic growth in Britain has stalled and chances are one-in-four that the Brexit crisis has already tipped the country into a recession, a leading think tank said on Monday. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said risks to growth were “heavily weighted to the downside” given that the chances Britain would leave the European Union without a deal were now roughly 40%. Boris Johnson, the front-runner to become prime minister this week, has said he will ramp up preparations for a no-deal exit to try to force ...