Pretty soon you’re talking real money (in Mandarin)

It wasn’t just the Olympics. When you don’t have voters and a free press to worry about, you can really push the publicly funded boat out a long way.

China is planning a fiscal stimulus over the next two years of $586 billion – that’s in the region of 15% of GDP.

Clearly, desperate times call for desperate measures: the IMF predicts Chinese economic growth will slow sharply next year to a measly 8.5%...

I don’t have any clever points to make – I’m just agog at the numbers. This century is going to be very different from the last.