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...estimated storm-related losses at about $3 billion. Economists say this figure is bound to rise. "I'd guess in the end [the crisis] will shave a couple tenths of a percentage point off China's GDP growth this year," says Ben Simpfendorfer, a China economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong. That's not much considering that the country's GDP growth rate was 11.4% last year. But the situation may have been made worse because factories were forced to close and shipments disrupted just as the country's industrial base typically cranks up production...
...Exporters will get off relatively lightly, because most are located in warmer coastal provinces near ports, says Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai. Hardest hit will be producers that rely heavily on electricity such as aluminum and steel makers. But few companies will escape unscathed. Million Freight, a logistics company based in the normally balmy southern city of Shenzhen, was forced to stop taking new shipments on Jan. 28 because existing freight was stacking up. "Nearly all trains coming in and leaving from Shenzhen are delayed by seven or eight hours," says an executive...
...October due largely to rising food and fuel costs. The storms will almost certainly cause another spike. Frigid temperatures across 14 provinces in China are destroying vegetable crops and will "push up food prices further in January and February," says Jun Ma, chief China economist at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. The consequences could be serious, says Simpfendorfer of the Royal Bank of Scotland. "Even if [inflation] creeps up to 7.5%, that grabs the headlines and will affect expectations...
Listen, let me tell you something: I knew Nick Leeson. Oh, OK, not personally. But as a reporter, I covered Leeson, the young trader who single-handedly broke the bank at Barings in 1995. And you know what? This kid Jérôme Kerviel, the 31-year-old who managed to lose $7.2 billion (that's with a B) at Paris investment bank Société Générale in just a few weeks, he's ... he's ... so much like Leeson that it's scary...
...those who don't recall, Leeson was 27 years old, living in Singapore, and trading futures contracts based on the Nikkei stock index and Japanese government bonds when he got into trouble in the mid-'90s. He was anything but one of the investment banking "Masters of the Universe" made famous by Tom Wolfe in the 1980s. He was a relatively ordinary young professional on an obscure trading desk, who bet the wrong way on the Nikkei's direction; then he doubled down, trying to recoup the firm's money, and lost again. At one point in early...