(Memory Lane) Can you feel the love? Slush China is launched succesfully in 2015, Zhongguancun Beijing

Video from the archives! Beijing Slush China team after-afterparty

-A night to remember -

Late Summer Highlights - Charting Social Impact Initiative at Helsinki Fashion Week

My Helsinki Fashion Week Best Dressed Award goes to the gentleman on the right

September Highlights

Study notes on topic: Keynesian economics, China and the global financial crisis

Returning to readings in global political economy.
Link to "Mainly Macro" blog below 

"Trade collapsed in the winter of 2008 around the globe, without exception. This was very bad news for China. Whereas exports had been around 35% of GDP in 2007, they fell to around 25% of GDP in 2009. That is a big hole to fill, and if it wasn’t filled, there was a chance that Chinese growth would collapse completely with damaging knock on (multiplier) effects to the rest of the economy. Above all else, China feared the political consequences of the unrest widespread unemployment would bring.

As Tooze recounts, China’s reaction was swift and bold. In November 2008 it announced a stimulus package of public spending worth 12.5% of GDP. (The Obama stimulus package, by comparison, was around 5% of GDP.) “Over the days that followed [the announcement], across China, provincial party meetings were hurriedly convened …” Within a year 50% of the stimulus projects were underway. Some of this stimulus paid for what Tooze describes as “perhaps the most spectacular infrastructure project of the last generation anywhere in the world”, the Chinese high speed rail network. Monetary policy was also relaxed.

In 2008 as a whole, before the stimulus and hardly touched by the collapse in world trade, Chinese GDP grew by 9.6%. In 2009, when GDP in the advanced countries fell by 3.4%, Chinese growth was 9.1%. The stimulus package had filled the whole left by collapsing Chinese exports...

China... was not part of the global banking network that caused the GFC. But the US and UK stimulus programmes could and should have been larger. Those close to the action tell me that the UK was running out of things to spend more money on in 2008/9, but I cannot help think this amounts to a failure of imagination: it is not as if UK infrastructure is great, there are no flood defence projects left to do etc. Above all else China’s example tells you what a huge mistake 2010 austerity was."

mainly macro: How China beat the Global Financial Crisis: If you were hoping for something on yesterday’s interest rate rise, I can only direct you to the leader in the FT today which says: “Ther...