Gwynn Guilford

The numbers: Pretty bad. Even though July-September sales hit ¥2.5 trillion ($25.4 billion) (pdf), 16% higher than the same quarter last year, Nissan’s net profit came in at ¥107.8 billion ($1.1 billion) this last quarter, a mere 2% increase. A bigger worry is that the company cut 15% off its full-year profit forecast, saying it will now earn net income of ¥355 billion yen in the year ending March 31, 2014. Though that’s still bigger than the previous year, the increase will be due in no small part to the weaker yen.

Bad loans are finally floating to the surface. China’s “Big Four” lenders—Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of China—reported a combined 329.4 billion yuan ($54 billion) in bad debt, based on their unaudited Q3 earnings. That’s the “biggest increase in soured loans since at least 2010,” said Bloomberg, and brings their combined bad loan ratio to 1.02%.

When it broke out among humans in 2002, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) killed 750 people, sickened around 8,000, and drained at least $40 billion from the global economy. Since 2004, no SARS cases have been reported.

The post-Snowden era is forcing everyone to come to grips with the constant surveillance employed by governments of all stripes. Well, not everyone. If you believe the official government line, we’re all just being paranoid.

Many argue that China’s soaring housing prices are due to a squeeze in housing supply. But a new report by Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of Beijing-based J Capital Research, puts more firepower behind the argument that China has too much housing, not too little. “There is no city in the country without stretches of terrifyingly empty towers,” she writes.

Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, has just become the latest Chinese tech giant to get into the finance business. Yesterday it launched a new “wealth management product” (WMP), a high-interest deposit account, called Baifa (Chinese). It has already attracted more than 1 billion yuan ($164.3 million) in deposits.

Shuanghui International’s $7.1 billion purchase of US pork giant Smithfield was a US milestone for many reasons. Not only was it the biggest investment ever by a Chinese company, it also was proof that the US government could make impartial decisions about Chinese investment. And it meant that 70,000 US workers are now in the employ of Chinese-owned, US-based companies—more than twice the pre-Smithfield number—according to Rhodium Group, an advisory firm.

Communist Party bigwigs in Henan province are giving a new meaning to the term “government pork.” The party secretary and chief of a Henan town called Xuchang ran up a tab of more than 700,000 yuan ($115,000) at a local pig trotter restaurant over the course of three years, as Sinosphere’s Chris Buckley recently wrote, before the restaurant’s owner finally called in their debts. Struggling to support his family while ill and saddled in his own debts, the owner tacked up two giant red banners outside his restaurant outlining how much the town Party heads owed. Days later, the local government had settled the bill and the officials were suspended.

Money market rates in China climbed again last week, prompting more worries of a deja vu of June’s cash crunch that spooked global markets. That was when the Shibor—the Shanghai interbank offering rate, which tracks the interest rates banks charge each other—soared, reminding many of the Libor leap that happened just before Lehman’s demise in 2008.

Money market rates opened at a four-month high in China today, triggering some unpleasant flashbacks of the cash crunch that jarred markets for a week or so in June. What’s going on?

The Beijing government recently announced a 1 trillion yuan ($163 billion) plan to clean up its deadly and expensive air pollution problem. Its success hinges mainly on sharp cuts in regional coal consumption.

Anytime there’s drama around US fiscal and monetary policy, commentators and policymakers typecast the US and China as debtor and creditor, respectively. Those who criticize US policies worry that China, the biggest foreign buyer of US government debt, will drive up interest rates in the US as it shifts out of Treasurys. Annoyed that loose US economic policies have eroded the value of its foreign reserves, the Chinese government is only too happy to act out the part of the indignant lender.

As global warming makes more parts of the world hospitable to more creatures, humans are struggling to adjust. Some are having a harder time than others. Take a secondary school in Gloucestershire county of the UK that had to close down today due to an infestation of Britain’s most venomous spider.

When people retire, they often find new hobbies to fill the time—golf, maybe, or contract bridge. Perhaps Xbox. Rising numbers of elderly Japanese, however, are picking up a more sinister pastime: stalking. In 2012, the number of stalking incidents perpetrated by people aged 60 and over hit 1,834, a surge of 3.8 times compared with 2003, according to the National Police Agency (via RocketNews24, which translates the Japanese press). Stalkers aged 70 and older jumped to 505, a 460% increase from 2003.

Back in 2150 BC, Emperor Yu sealed his place in China’s history of eminent rulers by controlling the Yellow River’s annual flood, saving waterlogged crops. Today China’s rulers face the opposite problem: It’s water scarcity that threatens farms. So instead of the Yellow River, the Chinese government is controlling the rain.

In early October, Typhoon Fitow strafed China’s eastern seaboard with the heaviest rainfall in a century, leaving Shanghai, Ningbo and Yuyao, the latter two cities located in Zhejiang province, with some $2 billion in damages. In Yuyao, where losses are estimated to have hit $1.15 billion, thousands took to the waterlogged streets in protest last week, braving threat of arrest by police in riot gear. Why the outrage? Many residents felt the government fumbled its response to the flooding, and took too long to restore water and electricity.

It’s getting colder in China, which means firing up the coal plants and turning the atmosphere into a toxic sauna.

Just as it was getting harder for Chinese companies to wring profits out at home, the global financial crisis made overseas assets super-cheap. That sent waves of Chinese companies investing overseas. While China’s outbound investment totaled just $9.9 billion in 2005, it hit $42 billion in the first six months of 2013 alone, according to the Heritage Institute, a think tank. And the rate of increase is now higher than that of foreign direct investment into China.

That’s how the People’s Liberation Army destroys the nests of the giant wasps that have been terrorizing China’s Shaanxi province: with a flamethrower (h/t RocketNews24). But what happens when there’s not just one nest, but thousands, all of them containing unusually irritable giant hornets, and the national guard is nowhere to be found?

After two surprisingly dismal quarters, China is finally back, posting GDP growth of 7.8% for the third quarter, compared with Q3 2012. That’s way higher than the 7.7% that most expected thanks to a flood of government spending, and up from Q2’s grim 7.5%, the lowest growth since the financial crisis. Here’s a look at the trend:

On the whole, the Chinese government has been pretty restrained throughout the debt ceiling standoff. But apparently, it was saving the moralizing for after a bargain was struck. First we have this from a Xinhua (English-only) commentary, by the same writer who recently called for “de-Americanization“:

Last year, for the first time ever, China’s spending on experimental research exceeded 1 trillion yuan ($163 billion). China’s state research and development spending has grown around 18% each year since 2008 (pdf, p.18), but that’s apparently not good enough: China now aims to boost R&D spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2020 (pdf, p.2), from its current 1.1%. Some think China will overtake the US as the world’s leading science producer (paywall) as early as 2020, or even sooner.

As the security of the greenback falters, a slew of recent headlines suggest that the yuan continues its global conquest. On Oct, 15, British chancellor George Osborne said that new agreements with China will seal London as a “the pre-eminent center” outside of Hong Kong for “internationalization of the renminbi,” reports the Financial Times (paywall), using the alternative name for the yuan. That comes on the heels of the European Central Bank’s €45 billion ($57 billion) currency swap with the People’s Bank of China (PBOC).

Last week, Sweden’s Oskarshamn nuclear power plant, which supplies 10% of the country’s energy, had to shut down one of its three reactors after a jellyfish invasion clogged the piping of its cooling system. The invader, a creature called a moon jellyfish, is 95% water and has no brain. Not what you might call menacing if you only had to deal with one or two.