McKinsey Quarterly on China

For those that don't get the McKinsey Quarterly I would recommend it.  It is free and can be found here.

The current issue is all about China, with some opinion pieces on China's potential for future growth and some more detailed insights into various different sectors like banking and consumer spending.  Some sections come with nice graphics and good numbers.

There are some useful charts for those who are perpetually looking for information on aspects of the Chinese economy, with infrastructure spending in particular looked at in detail.  Below are some of the nicer charts on infrastructure spend, stock and planned expansions.

One of the best pieces of insight in the Quarterly comes from a piece which reflects on forecasting in previous years.  One of the better points for me is

"Trying to forecast exactly when discontinuities will happen is a fool's game.  But identifying what types of discontinuities could occur - and having a plan to deal with them if they do - is a basic corporate responsibility" 

This seems very pertinent to China at the moment.  There has been a huge amount of debate and a turning of the tide on forecasts for growth in China since the new leadership took over earlier in the year.

The rapid shift in consensus expectations suggested that many weren't ahead of the curve of the risk of policymakers tolerating weaker growth. It still seems that the risks to expectations are to the downside, although we don't want to get too carried away as some of this weakness is cyclical as well.,