The great China crash is here

Sunday 23 July 2023

Let me walk you through a few charts to give you a sense of how severe is the Chinese economic crisis.

In Q2, real GDP grew 0.9%, well below the annualised target rate of 5%. It will still hit the annual target owing to generous base effects and earlier better quarters.

But this is not the real problem. For that, we need to look at the nominal economy. When we adjust for the GDP deflator of -1.5%, the nominal Chinese economy shrank 0.6% in Q2:

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific's leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.