Chinese Consumers Show Signs Of Life, But It Ain’t ‘Common Prosperity’

I'm pretty unforgiving by now when it comes to face-value assessments of monthly macro releases out of Beijing. It's unfair -- "inaccurate" is probably the better word, given that I don't care a lot about being "fair" to an authoritarian who'd just as soon have me executed as look at me -- to call the data "fake." It's not "fake" in the sense that Xi's statisticians couldn't show you the math (they could), nor is it "fake" in the sense that you can't get from them the underlying figures used to