As I noted earlier, Chinese data today was the first persuasive signal that growth is set to slow as expected in H2 this year. Capital Economics has more:
The activity and spending data for July all came in below expectations, reversing most of improvement seen at the end of Q2. Nonetheless, industrial production still looks unsustainably strong given the growing headwinds to investment growth from policy tightening.
Industrial value-added expanded 6.4% y/y last month (the Bloomberg median was 7.1%, our forecast was 7.5%), down from 7.6% in June. Admittedly, we don’t put much weight on the headline figures for industrial growth since they appear to suffer from similar flaws to the GDP data and have been implausibly stable in recent years.