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- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said the global economy has weakened further and warned it was "highly vulnerable to adverse shocks".
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This is not the same China that executed the Great Leap Forward, but it still carries some of the baggage that enabled the GLF to happen. Lies between Central and Regional governments are SOP, and whistle-blowing is only condoned when it serves a political goal, much like the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Even shorting bubbles in an economic sense can put you at risk. The economy does what the CCP says it does in China, and no one can understand what is going on in Chinese politics unless you are Chinese and are brave and/or foolish. But the Chinese economic reality has limits where it interacts with the rest of the world. In the GLF, the CCP exported grain while the Chinese people starved.
Maybe they should chill the fuck out about asset prices. Central banks the world over, led by Greenspan in the 80s, have made asset prices a proxy for the economy at large. This has the perverse effect of making bubbles seem like good things and bubbles bursting as bad things.