China Inflation Unlikely to Ease Soon: Economist

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

11/09/2010

China Inflation Unlikely to Ease Soon: Economist

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's consumer price inflation will hover above 3 percent in the final quarter of this year, driven by global excess liquidity and a spike in agricultural prices, a senior government economist said in remarks published on Monday.

Fan Jianping, chief economist with State Information Center, a think tank under the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, also said that interest rate increases would not help to curb inflation, although they could possibly help contain asset price bubbles.

"Global agricultural prices will continue to climb up for a while under the U.S. quantitative easing policy," Fan said. "Agricultural prices will have monetary foundation to stabilize only when the global money supply returns to neutral."

A surge in hot money inflows, combined with domestic speculative money, will drive up Chinese agricultural prices, he told the official China Securities Journal.

Read more at ABC News

Nov 9, 2010 12:38:17 AM | Current Affairs, Economy