An interesting article relating to a 7.% decline in Chinese exports caught my eye today. It took me a minute to find the time to come back and actually read the paper because I was sort of busy doing other things. Went out to eat and finally came back to sit down for a while. I figured I better stay on top of the news for my own economic research so I cracked open my digital newspaper, smoothed out the edges, and began to read while sipping my coffee ☕ (Ok none of that has anything to do with the article....sorry......😆)

Read this interesting article on some reasons why this might be happening.

China's exports fall 7.5% in May, adding to stimulus talk

The article states, "debt-laden property sector, limp consumer confidence and a global economic slowdown". I might take this to mean we saw some housing large real estate lending banking difficulties last year, consumers don't have product appetite, in general the supply chains might be adjusting and shifting due to geopolitical issues (Of which some of that may be related to support of Russia, I would be curious which countries specifically declined in purchasing Chinese products/services and was that more pronounced in some localities when compared to general decline in the market? i.e. are there other factors beyond the market itself such as general moral sentiment over such conflicts? I don't know, I didn't look but it would be interesting to pull economic data if available and see if one could feasibly come to that possible conclusion. That data is probably is available but would need to be statistically analyzed for strength of relationship and variances. The video below mentions that the U.S. and European exports are down but whether or not there is another reason would need to be ruled out.)

According to the IMF reports on GDP we can sort of see how China is on a somewhat downward trend in GDP growth over the last say 20 years (...since the peak in the 90's. I wonder if we could call this the decade where we sort of shortchanged America for a few pennies on the share?🤔 🤑💸) and the U.S. looks like it could be leveling off in its GDP growth decline. (Imagine if we could turn more positive with improvements in human capital, technology, infrastructure and government decision making collaboration. Wow...it would be amazing what we could do! 💁).

Just so I'm not confusing anyone, including myself (I actually do confuse myself sometimes but sometimes that comes from too many divergent possibilities and I'm not sure in all the places where they may intersect and create certain outcomes and under what circumstances. That happens when there are too many contingencies of possibilities without enough information to actually understand the powerful probability of potential paths. Basically its annoying things that can't fully be understood until new information is brought forward.). I'm saying that China is increasing but the rate of that increase is declining while the decline of U.S. GDP growth may have slowed. What would be interesting is if at the end of this year, and perhaps the start (to middle) of next year we saw a small sputter of a reversal (i.e. US growth).

These things are really hard to predict and I suspect there are many other outcomes. For the past few decades we have not been at our most competitive (Cant figure out why. 🧐 However, if China is experiencing some problems, U.S. companies are faster at adapting, and at the end of the day policies and behaviors improve national performance, at that point anything is possible.)

IMF China