Overnight, Adam marveled at a set of Chinese economic statistics…

I caution him to consider Chinese economic statistic in the same way a spectator should consider professional wrestling. They are for entertainment purposes only. Perhaps you can glean the mood among the Politburo by the trajectory of the data, but taking the figures at face value is probably not a productive exercise.

In other words, watch what they do, not what they say. They have begun to ease credit conditions after a long clamp-down. The message to me is clear: China fears a global slowdown could derail its efforts to move the population off the farm and into manufacturing and allied sectors.