A very clear slowdown. (See China's manufacturing PMI heads south)
Europe is (more or less) still recovering, though I would not describe it as a runaway boom.
But the US is sliding. Plus, China's slowdown is forcing the country to export deflation as her industry tries to survive the domestic crunch.
Quelle pagaille ! Trump's tariff tango is endangering the world economy. The world's two largest economies are at best stagnating. And the trends don't look good.
[Technical note: Most Chinese economic time series are affected by the peripatetic Chinese New Year, which can be in January or February. The NBS (National Bureau of Statistics) often does not publish data for January and February, or publishes an average for the two months.
Seasonally adjusting these time series is difficult. This is complicated further by China's publishing industrial production as a year-on-year change, not as an index. Estimating an index was made more tricky by successive Covid lockdowns. I have found that my seasonal adjustment program was not completely removing seasonality because of these problems.
So I have adjusted somewhat the method of calculation for Chinese IP, by seasonally adjusting my estimated IP index before and after covid separately. In addition, I have fitted a centred 12-month moving average to the resulting time series. By definition, a 12-month moving average contains no seasonality. The rate of change I show is calculated from the average of my seasonally adjusted index and its 12-month centred moving average. I hope this still leaves enough variation to detect change in business cycle trends, without being misled by spurious seasonality.]
