Beijing

Xi solidified his power base with loyalists without signalling a successor. It’s looking increasingly like China and the rest of the world will be stuck with Xi Jinping beyond 2022.

As the BBC reports, China has revealed its new senior leadership committee, breaking with tradition by not including a clear successor to President Xi Jinping. The omission cements Mr Xi's grip on China for the next five years and possibly beyond, a day after his name was written into the constitution.

Back in March, we explained why the "fate of the world economy is in the hands of China's housing bubble." The answer was simple: for the Chinese population, and growing middle class, to keep spending vibrant and borrowing elevated, it had to feel comfortable and confident that its wealth will keep rising.

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

As reported first thing this morning, China's President Xi Jinping outlined his vision for the next five years, ushering in a "new era" (a term he repeated 36 times) of development in China, as the Communist Party’s 19th Congress opened in Beijing on Wednesday. During a 3½-hour long speech, Xi said the internal and external situations facing China were undergoing complicated changes which the party needed to address.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

For those of you who don’t know Andy Xie, he’s an MIT-educated former IMF economist and was once Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia-Pacific economist. Xie is known for a bearish view of China, and not Beijing’s favorite person. He’s now an ‘independent’ economist based in Shanghai. He gained respect for multiple bubble predictions, including the 1997 Asian crisis and the 2008 US subprime crisis.