China, the world’s second-largest economy “tanked spectacularly this week”, sending the Chinese stock market into free fall before causing shockwaves across the globe.
But according to Huffington Post UK, the downturn has been “months in the making”, with signs very clearly on the wall for anyone who stopped to read them.
For now, Portugal, like every other economy in Europe, will be counting the cost of Black Monday.
“There is virtually no industry that does not influence nor any multinational that does not include Chinese land, labour or capital somewhere in its supply chain,” The Spectator has commented.
As worse is yet to come – and Huffington Post warns journalists are now plundering their thesauruses for ever-more dramatic words to describe events in China – the Bank of Portugal has finally admitted its ‘deal’ with Chinese insurance company Anbang to purchase trouble-torn Novo Banco may have well and truly hit the skids.
The Financial Times revealed yesterday (Sunday) that the European Central Bank “had privately expressed reservations over a Chinese group acquiring a systemically important European lender” and that the Bank of Portugal “was getting cold feet”.
On the face of it, this glitch in the process that the coalition government had hoped to have out of the way long before the elections may have had less to do with the Chinese economic crisis than the terms of the deal itself.
But Black Monday will certainly not have helped the situation and a lot more, and worse, is set to follow.
