China

President Trump clearly wants to avoid friction with Xi Jinping and therefore no longer rails against China.

Novartis expects growth in China’s pharmaceuticals market to accelerate as the nation’s health authorities expedite approvals for new medicines and increase reimbursement. The Chinese pharmaceutical market may exceed $300 billion in sales by 2020, Chief Executive Officer Joe Jimenez said in an interview in Geneva on Tuesday. That will happen as regulators in the country push to offer new drugs to sick patients who’ve traditionally not had access to the world’s groundbreaking meds. The country is now the world’s second-biggest pharmaceutical market, behind the U.S.

Iron ore prices are retreating again and the overall Chinese economy is growing less quickly, but one sector is skyrocketing: outbound tourism. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation preliminary 2016 scorecard has Chinese spending $344 billion as foreign tourists, a jump of 12 per cent in local currencies and more than double the splurge of the next biggest spenders, Americans.

While travelers from China have grown to be Switzerland’s fifth largest market, with a record 1.52 million overnights in 2015, much of that is low-yield tour groups series taking the traditional route of Italy-Switzerland-France, and largely benefiting Swiss destinations such as Lucerne and Interlaken.

Germany and China continue to have great trade surpluses while the US trade deficit has not yet been corrected by the Trump administration. Oil is still the most important source of energy with the Middle East a main supplier. Given these additional factors, it should be clear that any disturbance will have far-reaching consequences since the Fed, ECB and BoJ cannot lower interest rates to fend off a recession or depression. The huge injections of liquidity into the global financial system in recent years have had the result among others of producing little or no growth.

A new auction record was reached when the Pink Star went for $71.2 million, at a Sotheby’s auction Tuesday in Hong Kong . It was sold just five minutes into bidding, the BBC reports. The Pink Star is the largest flawless fancy vivid pink diamond ever graded by the Gemological Institute of America. The diamond had failed to sell in November 2013 when the buyer could not pay for its value at that time which was placed at $83 million.

The gorgeous bauble was purchased by well-known Hong Kong jeweler Chow Tai Fook and was immediately renamed the CTF Pink in memory of the late Dr. Cheng Yu-Tung, father of the current chairman and founder of Chow Tai Fook, and commemorates the brand’s 88th anniversary.

US regulators have agreed to a Chinese conglomerate’s proposed $43 billion acquisition of Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta on condition it sells some businesses to satisfy anti-monopoly objections.

China National Chemical and Switzerland’s Syngenta have agreed to divest three types of pesticides in order to win U.S. Federal Trade Commission approval for their $43 billion merger, the largest ever overseas acquisition by a Chinese company. A U.S. national security panel cleared the deal in August 2016, despite concerns among some lawmakers and farmers about China’s influence in U.S. food production.

Leading Chinese bitcoin exchange BTCC has announced the launch of a new global multicurrency wallet called Mobi. The app will be available on both iOS and Android platforms.

Mobi offers in-app conversion of more than 150 global currencies, including dollar, euro, pound, gold and silver. It also enables users to send money to any Twitter account and phone number, as well as an optional Visa debit card. China-based BTCC is a Bitcoin company founded in 2011 that operates an online trading exchange, mints physical bitcoins, and now has entered the mobile payments market.

The Chinese economy is investing again in 2017, the latest data from the Statistics Bureau shows. The first two months of 2017 saw China’s fixed capital investment rise 8.9 % compared to the same period last year, which was also above expectations of 8.2%. Most of this came from the public sector, where investments grew 14.4%. Private-sector investment, which constitutes 60% of the total investment, increased by 6.7% from a year ago, the highest growth rate in a year.

"Today’s data appeared to be mainly driven by infrastructure spending and a rebound in the real estate sector," said Zhou Hao, a Singapore-based economist at Commerzbank.