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China lawmakers gather to approve long-awaited fiscal stimulus

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China lawmakers gather to approve long-awaited fiscal stimulus

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China’s lawmakers will begin a week-long session on Monday that is expected to approve the country’s largest fiscal package since the pandemic to boost confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.

Beijing has yet to indicate the scale of the measures, but finance minister Lan Fo’an last month promised it would help resolve some of the trillions of dollars of debt weighing down China’s cash-strapped local governments.

Analysts believe China needs to spend up to Rmb10tn ($1.4tn) over three years to help reflate an economy that has been hit by a prolonged property slump.

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But they warn that China will need to target fiscal spending not just at local government debt but also at households, which have suffered from the real estate crisis, if it is to rekindle confidence in the economy.

Fiscal easing “holds the key for the effectiveness of the ongoing stimulus package”, Goldman Sachs analysts said in a report, highlighting the importance of this week’s NPC meeting.

China’s stimulus drive started abruptly in late September when the central bank and other financial regulators announced interest rate cuts and other monetary measures to prop up the stock and real estate markets.

Economists believe China’s leaders became concerned after GDP in the three months to the end of September grew at a rate below the official annual target of 5 per cent for the second quarter in a row.

China is grappling with what some call a two-speed economy, with strong exports offsetting weak domestic demand.

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But market excitement over Beijing’s initial change of heart on the stimulus has been tempered by the slow release of details of the next phase of the campaign: the fiscal spending package.

NPC Observer, a website tracking China’s parliament, said the NPC would probably announce its decision on the fiscal package on state television evening news on Friday, with the details to come later that day.

China’s deputy minister of finance Liao Min said in Washington late last month that the package would involve “a series of powerful measures” to resolve debt problems at local governments, which were heavily reliant on land sales until the country’s property bubble burst in 2021.

He said the policies would also aim to stabilise the real estate market and spur domestic demand with schemes to encourage industry to upgrade its equipment and consumers to replace home appliances and other goods.

“China is confident that it will achieve the annual economic growth target . . . and continue to inject momentum into global economic growth,” Liao said, according to the finance ministry website. 

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Analysts believe the NPC could raise the debt ceiling to allow the issuance of up to Rmb6tn of swaps for local governments to refinance off-balance sheet debt.

Economists said the NPC could also approve an additional Rmb1tn in special sovereign bonds to recapitalise large state banks.

Goldman said the government might raise the official central government fiscal deficit target to 3.6 per cent of GDP next year from 3 per cent this year. It said the fiscal package would be smaller than during Covid and earlier years.

Most analysts cautioned that while tackling local government debt was good for financial stability and might spur some consumption if it led to the payment of civil servant salaries and arrears to suppliers, it would not add much to demand. Nor would the recapitalisation of banks.

“Any additional borrowing approved for these policies won’t provide much of a fiscal boost,” said Leah Fahy, China economist at Capital Economics.

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Macquarie economist Larry Hu also warned that the aim of the stimulus was mainly to meet official growth targets.

“The stimulus measures announced so far are sufficient to achieve 5 per cent GDP growth this year, but not enough to reflate the economy. Consumer and homebuyer confidence remains low,” Hu said.

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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.

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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.

By former President Donald J. Trump’s account, the country is awash in crime. But in fact, under President Biden, the rate of violent crime has fallen.

It is a refrain that dates to Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, when he often cited false statistics to claim historically high murder rates and record-breaking urban crime. After he was elected, those warnings waned, even though the country had its biggest one-year increase in murder in 2020, when he was in office.

Once he lost that election, though, Mr. Trump wasted no time in falsely claiming crime records, saying in a 2022 address that “our country is now a cesspool of crime.”

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In making the case for a second term, Mr. Trump has stuck to that message, though his argument has evolved this election cycle from false claims on crime rates to an attack on the credibility of any evidence that refutes him. Here’s how.

March 2, 2024

Mr. Trump selectively homes in on crime in cities, including at a rally in Greensboro, N.C.

Mr. Trump had a point that violent crime in Washington had increased in 2023. But it was one of few outliers. Violent crime overall decreased across the country by 3 percent, and the number of homicides declined on average by 10 percent across 32 cities tracked by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. In Washington and seven other cities, though, the number of homicides increased.

April 13, 2024

Mr. Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania, falsely balloons the level of crime in New York.

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Crime, in fact, decreased in the year before March 2024 by 5 percent, and murders by 19.4 percent, the city reported just days before Mr. Trump’s remarks. And in 2023, overall crime declined by 0.3 percent and murders by 11.9 percent, to 386 in 2023 from 438 in 2022.

Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.

May 18, 2024

As the general election nears, his claims grow more hyperbolic.

“There’s too much crime in the country. We’ve never seen crime like this before.”

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Mr. Trump, in an interview with a Dallas news station, warns more broadly of a nationwide crime wave. That is false. Violent crime and property crime are near the lowest level in decades, despite public perception to the contrary. And while there was an increase in crime during the pandemic, violent crime was higher in 2020 under Mr. Trump than under Mr. Biden so far.

May 18, 2024

That same day, he attributes the increase to Democratic policies.

Speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump vividly and baselessly casts blame on his political opponents.

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June 15, 2024

Mr. Trump wrongly blames methodological changes for obscuring crime trends.

The claim, made at a conservative gathering in Detroit, is misleading. Days earlier, the F.B.I. released a preliminary assessment estimating that crime had fallen in the first three months of 2024. But Mr. Trump insisted the data was fraudulent.

In 2021, the F.B.I. started relying on a new data collection system, aggregating crime data from local and state police departments. Many agencies had yet to fully transition, resulting in reporting from only 68 percent of agencies, which covered about 66 percent of the population. So Mr. Trump has a point that data collection in 2021 was unusually incomplete, but the reported national crime rate that year did not simply omit a third of the country, as he said. Rather, the F.B.I. used a standard statistical process to fill in the blanks and estimate crime for the missing jurisdictions to generate a national rate.

The F.B.I.’s national estimates included data from more agencies in subsequent years: 93.5 percent of the population in 2022 and 94.3 percent in 2023. Both years continued to show a decline in crime compared with 2020.

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June 22, 2024

At a rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump insists that the official statistics are “fake.”

“The F.B.I. crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake.”

Minutes later, he points to a different data set, also from the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump was cherry-picking those statistics and referring to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which showed a 43 percent increase in the violent crime rate, from 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 to 23.5 in 2022. (Unlike the F.B.I.’s crime rate, which relies on crimes reported to the police, this rate relies on responses to a survey.)

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Left unsaid: The 2022 rate was comparable to rates under the Trump administration (23.2 in 2018 and 21.0 in 2019) and still lower than rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, in 2023, that rate declined to 22.5 per 1,000 people.

Aug. 3, 2024

He repeats those percentages during a rally in Atlanta.

“Nationwide, there’s been a 43 percent increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58 percent increase in rape, 89 percent increase in aggravated assault and a 56 percent increase in stone-cold robbery.”

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Sept. 6, 2024

Addressing the Fraternal Order of Police union in Charlotte, N.C., he again cites those figures.

“Since Kamala Harris took office, she has presided over a 43 percent increase in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in rape and an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault.”

Sept. 10, 2024

Mr. Trump reprises his claims during the presidential debate.

Sept. 18, 2024

In a Fox News interview, Mr. Trump inaccurately cites an analysis to claim a huge increase in crime.

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“I was right. The following day, D.O.J. announced numbers — I don’t know who it was in D.O.J., but somebody over there likes me — that crime is up 45 percent, murders up, numbers like you wouldn’t even believe.”

Since the debate, Mr. Trump has seized upon and further inflated an analysis repeated in conservative news outlets of revised F.B.I. statistics.

In its September report estimating that violent crime had declined by 3 percent in 2023, the F.B.I. released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions, according to an analysis published by Fox News, show a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022.

But even that 4.5 percent figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has noted. That is because crime data from 2021 was incomplete, as police departments across the country transitioned to a different reporting system. Moreover, the revised data still show that violent crime had declined overall since 2020.

This dark assessment of soaring violence and lawlessness under Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris has been central to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — even though the facts show otherwise.

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Ukraine says it has attacked North Korean troops in Kursk

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Ukraine says it has attacked North Korean troops in Kursk

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Ukrainian officials said on Monday that their forces had fired at North Korean soldiers in combat for the first time since their deployment by Russia to its western Kursk region.

The clashes mark the first direct intervention by a foreign army since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, as well as an expansion of what was already the largest land war in Europe since the second world war.

“The first military units of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] have already come under fire in Kursk,” Andriy Kovalenko, Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official within the national security council, said on Telegram. A senior Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed the military engagement to the Financial Times but declined to provide further details.

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In Kyiv, foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said he had discussed with his visiting German counterpart Annalena Baerbock the “need for decisive action” in response to North Korea’s deepening involvement in the war.

“We urge Europe to realise that the DPRK troops are now carrying [out] an aggressive war in Europe against a sovereign European state,” Sybiha said in a news conference.

The US on Monday called out Russia and China at the UN Security Council for “shamelessly protecting” and emboldening North Korea. South Korea and the EU also condemned the deployment and expressed concern that Russia could reward North Korea with transfers of nuclear and ballistic technology.

Another senior Ukrainian official told the FT that Moscow was already providing military technologies to Pyongyang to help with its missile programmes, as well as “money”.

In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin met North Korea’s foreign minister, Choe Son-hui, in the Kremlin on Monday.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and North Korean foreign minister Choe Son-hui meet at the Kremlin on Monday © Mikhael Tereshchenko/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Choe passed on a greeting from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and signed a treaty with Putin in June that includes a mutual security assistance clause.

The foreign minister last week said that North Korea had “no doubt whatsoever that under the wise leadership of the honourable Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and people will surely achieve a great victory in their sacred struggle to defend the sovereign rights and security of their state”.

Putin has not confirmed the North Korean deployment but he hinted at it last month, indicating it fell under the security provisions in the treaty.

US and South Korean officials last week confirmed Ukraine’s assessment that around 8,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk last month to help Russia’s army push Ukrainian forces out of territory they have occupied since August. Senior Ukrainian intelligence officials told the FT that the forces were in barracks about 50km from the Ukrainian border and preparing to enter the fight within “days”.

Kyiv, Washington and Seoul said that Pyongyang had sent roughly 12,000 troops in all to Russia for its ongoing war effort, including 500 officers and three generals. The remaining forces are located in Russia’s far east, where they are undergoing training.

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The White House has said that the North Koreans would become “legitimate military targets” if they entered the fight against Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that Ukraine could see where Russia was gathering the North Koreans and urged western nations to lift restrictions on long-range weapons to “pre-emptively” strike them before they could attack his forces.

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The senior Ukrainian intelligence official declined to provide specifics about the first military engagement between his country’s forces and the North Koreans. But he said that it occurred within Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine controls some 600 sq km of territory, or a little more than half of what it previously held following the summer incursion that took Moscow by surprise.

Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, said over the weekend that Russia had armed the North Korean troops in Kursk with 60mm mortars, assault rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket launchers. The GUR said that some were also provided with night-vision devices and thermal imagers. A few hundred troops from North Korea’s special forces have also been deployed in Kursk.

Ukrainian officials and military analysts have raised questions about the quality and combat effectiveness of the North Korean troops, with most being described as inexperienced, low-ranking soldiers.

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“We will know soon” how well they can fight, said one of the officials on Monday.

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Both Candidates Exude Confidence, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind if Reporters Are Shot

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Both Candidates Exude Confidence, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind if Reporters Are Shot
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are exuding confidence as they head into Election Day. For Trump, that’s nothing new. He said over the weekend that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his presidency – despite losing the 2020 election to President Joe …
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