AUTO INDUSTRY/CHINA/ECONOMY/GERMANY/TRADE DEALS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “For three decades, China’s burgeoning demand for German cars, machines and engineering tools has been a steady engine of growth for Europe’s largest economy, gratefully championed by successive governments in Berlin. But the engine is starting to splutter. China’s economy is slowing, Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policies are hurting global trade and China’s factories are becoming rivals to the German giants that once supplied them. The slowdown is not helping at a challenging time for Germany. Its economy contracted 0.1% in the second quarter and some analysts expect third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) data due on Nov. 14 to show a similar decline – which would leave the economy in recession for the first time since 2013. While German trade with China is only a small part of the country’s 3.4 trillion euro (3.8 trillion) economy, it has been one of the few components of GDP that Berlin could count on to grow year after year.”
–Michael Nienaber, “Germany’s Chinese growth engine stalls,” Reuters, November 11, 2019 11:13 pm