Taking Stock: A slower China and a durian glut

**Will Bain** (0:03)
Now, we've done a lot of World Cup-themed openers over the last few weeks, but for reasons I can't possibly think of today, the day after England crashed out of the World Cup. We're now a World Cup-free zone. It never happened. Where was it, in fact? Can't even remember. Not sure I liked football at all. I'm retiring from it, if I ever did, for now at least. Binnis Parkman, good luck Spain and Argentina, he says through gritted teeth. We're taking stock of the Business Week here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
I'm Will Bain. Thanks for being back with us. Our panel this week, Emily Peck writes about markets for Axios, co-hosts the Slate Money Podcast, and she's joining us from New York. David Kuo, co-founder of Smart Investor, joining us from Singapore. Hello both. You had Messy Mania then, David, you were joking.

**David Kuo** (0:47)
Well, it's not Messy Mania. I mean, for goodness sake, I mean, how can you not talk about the World Cup? I know it's very sad that England crashed out to Argentina 2-1, but why did you give Messy the ball? I mean, surely anybody who gives-

**Will Bain** (1:01)
This is a question being asked by every national newspaper here today, Emily. You know what? Producer David gave me an escape route, a fire escape out of this, because he suggested talking about a viral Caesar sauce in McDonald's, and I would much rather do that for 20 minutes.

**Emily Peck** (1:16)
Well, this is fast food and it is our World Cup here in the United States in many ways.
McDonald's used to have a Caesar salad that was super popular. They took it off the menu in 2020 People want it back, and they haven't brought back the Caesar salad. We're having some salad issues here in the States. We can get into later if you want. But they did bring back the Caesar dipping sauce, and I'm not that into it, to be honest with you, Will. But people are really excited about it.

**Will Bain** (1:44)
It was a top trending term on Google, wasn't it? All week. The other viral food story of the week that I quite liked. Here in Europe, we've got these rules, guys, where you've got to have the bottle caps for recycling on soft drinks. You've got to be attached to them. We see President Zelensky trying to rip his off the other day. And that went viral. People are saying that's the end of Ukraine's hopes of joining the European Union as he breaches their sort of flagship recycling policy.

**Emily Peck** (2:08)
Never heard of such a policy here in the US. We're just bottles uncapped. It's chaos, I guess.

**Will Bain** (2:14)
Mayhem out there in the world.

**Emily Peck** (2:16)
Absolutely. Yes.

**David Kuo** (2:17)
He's not the only one, you know, Will. I mean, I try and rip that cap off as well because it gets in the way when you're trying to drink.

**Will Bain** (2:23)
Kuo and Zelensky aligned once again quite right, too. Shall we start in the world's second largest economy? Sharp slowdown this week in its economic growth. Here's how the Deputy Commissioner of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, Mao Shen Yong, summed it up.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:41)
I believe the fundamentals of the economy remains unchanged. The decline in growth in the second quarter was mainly due to short-term factors as well as some external influences.
Despite the slowdown in the second quarter, the fundamentals of the overall economy remains unchanged. The basic pattern of stable economic performance and its shift towards new and improved development has not changed.

**Will Bain** (3:06)
So pretty defiant there, the government, David. And as always with China, we're kind of measuring it against itself a bit here, because 4% growth, I mean, there are countries in Europe who would kill for half of that right now. But was there sort of under the bonnet, if you like, under the hood, as Emily and her colleagues would say, were there reasons to be concerned, particularly about the domestic economy?

**David Kuo** (3:27)
I think there are, Will. First of all, I mean, 4.3% is not good. China needs economic growth somewhere between 4.5% to 5% in order to have some kind of economic stability and social stability. And if it starts to drop below that, it means that there are going to be some serious social issues. So much so that just recently, China said that, oh, we're not going to be reporting urban employment numbers anymore. And it wasn't that long ago when they said, we're not going to report youth unemployment figures anymore, simply because they're just so embarrassingly high in one case, and the urban employment numbers are so embarrassingly low in another. And what seems to be happening in China at the moment is that they are trying to get people to move out from the urban areas back into the rural areas.