China’s State Council has announced a broad range of measures to make sure that there is plenty of liquidity in the economy next year and that consumers, companies and infrastructure projects get the loans they need so their spending can boost domestic economic activity.
Among the 30-point mandate (in Chinese):
a 17% target increase in money supply [...]
The leadership has been signaling for weeks that a massive stimulus package was coming and today Xinhua announced details of 4 trillion yuan of spending approved by the State Council on Wednesday.
A stimulus package estimated at 4 trillion yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) will be spent over the next two years to finance programs [...]
Not to poke fun at a touch of underpolishing by Xinhua’s editors, but this Bystander is wryly amused by the state news agency’s English language report of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s press conference following the Asia-Europe summit:
“Lessons should be learned from the financial crisis, and the responsibilities should be clarified for governments, companies and supervision, [...]
A still semi-closed financial system has isolated China in large degree from the turmoil in global financial markets. But it is not immune from the potential knock-on effects of a serious economic slowdown, or worse, in it key American and European export markets. So it is making a virtue of necessity by saying it will [...]
