The Editorial Board of the Financial Times wirtes that China's growth slowed to 6.5 per cent in the year to the third quarter, the slowest rate since the global financial crisis. Shock! Not! The slowdown does not suggest anything is wrong. It is insignificant in itself; the economy is still growing strongly. Above all, it is time the world stopped obsessing over China's growth targets and focused on what matters: the quality and sustainability of China's economic development. Some might believe (or, in some quarters, hope) that the slowdown proves that the US-China trade war is biting. But this hypothesis is inconsistent with the evidence. The value of China's exports, in US dollars, grew by 14.5 per cent in September, year on year. China also managed to achieve a record $34.1bn trade surplus with the US in that month. Conceivably, trade friction will bite in coming quarters. But it has definitely not done so yet. The decline in the growth rate is, moreover, from 6.7 per cent in the year to the second quarter. Nobody would regard such a slight difference as significant in the case of another economy. No sensible person even believes China's numbers are accurate to two-tenths of a percentage point. Above all, the growth rate, if correct, is still extremely healthy. If the Chinese government had not made such a fetish of its growth targets, nobody would care at all about this "slowdown". What matters is whether the nature of China's growth is changing. In the past the Chinese authorities achieved their targets by encouraging huge expansions of credit. Too often this led to wasteful investment. Subsequently, this meant scrapping excess capacity and writedowns of debt. Growth generated in this way is just waste. If today's slower growth avoids this error, it is a gain, not a loss.

Reuters reports that the outlook for global growth in 2019 has dimmed for the first time, according to Reuters polls of economists who said the U.S.-China trade war and tightening financial conditions would trigger the next downturn At the start of 2018, optimism about a robust global economic outlook was almost unanimous among respondents. But Reuters polls of more than 500 economists taken this month showed a downgrade to the outlook for 18 of 44 economies polled, with 23 unchanged. Only three were marginally upgraded. While risks from trade protectionism have been consistently highlighted by Reuters polls since January last year, the latest indicated that growth in about 70 percent of 44 economies surveyed has already peaked...A majority out of nearly 150 economists said the top two triggers for the next global downturn were a further escalation of U.S.-Sino trade tensions, and tightening in financial conditions driven by a deep sell-off in global equities or a rapid rise in government bond yields.

The Financial Times reports that a crop trading business of Chinese food group Cofco is expanding in the soyabean belt of Brazil as the country's farmers profit from the trade war between Beijing and Washington Cofco International Ltd three weeks ago began building a 60,000-tonne capacity silo complex in northern Mato Grosso, Brazil's top state for soya cultivation. It will feed into a long-distance transport network that trucks grains and oilseeds north to the Tapajós and Amazon rivers and then floats them by barge north-east to the Atlantic port of Barcarena.  "In Barcarena we load the vessels, basically to China," Valmor Schaffer, managing director of global asset management and Brazil for Cofco International, said in an interview.  China is the world's largest consumer of soyabeans, accounting for 60 per cent of global imports. Farmers in Brazil and the US have historically met most of its demand.  However, the trade war has upended the market. Beijing raised duties on leading US exports including soyabeans in response to tariffs the Trump administration imposed on $250bn of Chinese imports. US sales of soyabeans to China are running 89 per cent below a year ago despite a record autumn harvest, according to the US department of agriculture. One exporter just cancelled a 180,000-tonne sale to China, the department reported Friday.  The disruption has been a fillip to Brazilian farmers. Brazil's share of Chinese soyabean imports rose to 66 per cent in the year to August, from 48 per cent the previous year, the USDA estimated.