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By KEITH BRADSHERPublished: June 9, 2012
The forwarded article wast taken from New York Times at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E4DD1030F93AA35755C0A9649D8B63&ref=china
You guys are welcome to comment the article under the main thread.
HONG KONG -- Inflation slowed sharply in China last month as companies cut prices to cope with faltering demand, as the Chinese economy appeared to slow further, data released on Saturday morning showed.
Prices rose less quickly at the consumer level and actually fell at factory gates across the country. The fading of inflation gives Chinese officials considerable latitude to stimulate the economy, releasing brakes applied to bank loans, real estate investment and other sectors over the past two years when rising prices had seemed like a threat.
China's National Bureau of Statistics was preparing to release later on Saturday its May data for industrial production, retail sales and investment in fixed assets.
Consumer prices were up 3 percent in May from a year earlier, below economists' expectations of 3.2 percent and down from an annual increase of 3.4 percent in April. Producer prices tumbled for the third month in a row, down 1.4 percent from a year earlier, a faster fall than the 1.1 percent drop anticipated by economists.
Yang Lijiang, a vegetable seller in a street market in Dongguan in southeastern China, said on Thursday morning that because of a good harvest, most vegetables had stopped rising in price while watercress prices had fallen 40 percent this spring. ''There's more supply this year,'' she said.
China's leaders already took strong action on Thursday evening to try to arrest the economy's decline, almost certainly after receiving advance word of the downbeat statistics disclosed on Saturday morning. The central bank cut interest rates for all borrowers by a quarter of a percentage point, and by nearly a full percentage point for some borrowers.
The central bank lowered the regulated one-year interest rate for commercial bank loans to companies by a quarter of a percentage point, to 6.31 percent. The central bank separately announced that it was giving banks the discretion to offer an additional discount of roughly five-eighths of a percentage point for especially creditworthy borrowers.
The popping of a real estate bubble, with prices declining as much as 20 percent in some cities since last August, has slowed the economy, as has faltering demand in debt-troubled Europe for China's exports.
On Friday, Greentown China Holdings Ltd. became the first of China's leading property developers to resort to issue a large block of new shares at a discount to Hong Kong investors so as to raise desperately needed cash. The company said that it would raise the equivalent of $650 million by selling a 24.6 percent stake to Wharf (Holdings), and use the money to pay off some of its debts and provide working capital to keep operations going.
The shares are to be sold at a discount of 2.8 percent to the closing price on Thursday; the company's shares have already slid almost a third since July.
Real estate developers nationwide are running short on cash and have resorted to continuing construction work with a tiny crew on a single shift instead of three shifts around the clock.
Chinese banks typically do not call in loans if any work at all is still being done on a site. In Guangzhou and other cities, huge cranes move only once every couple hours to lift a single small load so as to suggest at least minimal activity is still under way, said a Guangzhou businessman who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of government scrutiny of the sector.
It is rare for the National Bureau of Statistics to announce economic indicators on a Saturday morning, a step that gives financial markets an entire weekend to digest the results. But the Chinese agency also resorted to weekend data releases in late 2008 and early 2009, when economic activity briefly plunged at the start of the global financial crisis.
China's General Administration of Customs has tentatively scheduled for roughly noon on Sunday in Beijing the release of export and import figures for May.
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