I didn’t get to this yesterday, but The New York Times reminded us why, for all the justified scorn that can be heaped upon much of its Op-Ed team and the occasions when the Village consumes its straight journalism, it remains essential.
You just don’t get this kind of article without a large, well-resourced commitment to sustained coverage. It tells us something we simply wouldn’t know — in any kind of broad public way — without such effort.
And the piece offers a model that the Village itself would do well to study: it provides a strong basis of fact with which to think about broader problems, and it suggests without dictating where that focus of interest might reside.
The piece, you see, is about something that sounds kind of mundane: an inventory overhang in China’s domestic market. A huge one:
The glut of everything from steel and household appliances to cars and apartments is hampering China’s efforts to emerge from a sharp economic slowdown. It has also produced a series of price wars and has led manufacturers to redouble efforts to export what they cannot sell at home.
The severity of China’s inventory overhang has been carefully masked by the blocking or adjusting of economic data by the Chinese government — all part of an effort to prop up confidence in the economy among business managers and investors.
But the main nongovernment survey of manufacturers in China showed on Thursday that inventories of finished goods rose much faster in August than in any month since the survey began in April 2004. The previous record for rising inventories, according to the HSBC/Markit survey, had been set in June. May and July also showed increases.
Now, China hands — some of them, at least, including folks I talk to — have been arguing for some time that China’s economy and society are much more vulnerable than some popular accounts have suggested.
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