Sanity please - let's have the Far East conference system
back in a TSA form

CONTAINER carriers on the Far East-Europe trade are repeatedly announcing price increases of more than 100 per cent of the market price, while providing no reasonable justification and for the fifth time this year, writes Alphaliner.
It has produced a situation where freight rates take a sudden hefty jump at the start of every month as carriers implement their monthly rate hikes, only to fall back to their old levels over the course of the month for the cycle to be repeated again in the following month.
The fact that the ocean carriers were largely unsuccessful with their four previous attempts to raise rates, has not stopped them from trying to impose another unilateral General Rate Increase (GRI), writes the Paris based research house.  >More
 

US-China trade: Growing more enormous every day, fraught
with rising diplomatic tension

ONE hopes, as we always do when China's leaders are restive and the Excited States of America reciprocates in kind, that all will calm so we shall get back to business.
And what a business it is! The US-China trade has always been a plethora of amazing numbers, so much so that we have become blas? hardly heeding the last breathless statistical recitation, however amazing.
But one can still be astonished by the scale of the growth. A few years ago, When we thought it was big, enormous in fact, it is surprising to what extent those once impressive figures have been dwarfed by the constantly rising volumes since then.  >More
 

China domestic demand disappoints those who believed bail
out the economy

AN import plunge dashed hopes that China would dig itself out of its export growth slump with pent-up consumer demand combined with a goodly dollop of stimulus spending from Beijing.
The way out of these disappointing results is to increase the rate of participation in the workforce from women, and increasingly from those aged over 65, say consultants McKinsey & Co in their latest paper. In an aging society, they say, retirement at the age of 60 or 65 is going to be a thing of the past.
Looking at the same question, the Euromonitor International consultancy compares and contrasts the consumer economies of China and the US, noting that private consumption in 2014 accounted for 68.3 per cent of GDP in the US while only 37.2 per cent in China. >More
 

Can China say goodbye to low-cost manufacturing and
embrace the new realities of the 'new normal'

OVER the past two decades, China has been the factory of the world, providing consumers in Europe and North America, in particular, with access to a wide array of low-cost goods.
Additionally, this resulted in a massive increase in world trade volumes and it also had a major impact on China as well. It has made the country what it is today, one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
But with first quarter figures in, this role is getting harder and harder to sustain with the economy growing at its slowest rate in six years - not helped by a global economy that has been slowing since 2011. >More