Matt Phillips

Last Spring, Chinese exports to Hong Kong mysteriously exploded. Actually, it wasn’t that mysterious. Many observers put the surge of exports to Hong Kong from the mainland down to a phenomenon known as “over-invoicing.” Essentially, money was flowing into China as payment for fictitious goods. Why? Because it was one of the few ways for investors to sneak their capital into the tightly controlled Chinese market, where a relatively fast-growing economy is like catnip to global investors.

China’s economic growth has appeared to downshift rapidly in recent months. Investors around the world have seen the numbers. And major indexes in Asia and Australia, where China is a key trading partner, have responded. But on the mainland itself, the view is apparently very different.

All of the sudden, the heart of Germany’s high-end manufacturing economy looks incredibly weak.

When you think about Spain, the first thing that pops into mind is undoubtedly one word: Elevators.

When it comes to lowering the US unemployment rate, President Barack Obama has done just as well as the revered conservative icon Ronald Reagan.

The US economy continued its labor market expansion in September, adding 248,000 new jobs. The economy has added 1.1 million new jobs since passing the pre-crisis employment peak of 138.4 million jobs.

Bill Gross had a great run at the helm of the Pimco Total Return Fund, starting at its inception in 1987.

Long Shanghai. Short hogs.

Kenya’s economy grew by roughly 25% today, when government statisticians decided that its annual output was worth 4.76 trillion shillings ($53.3 billion), instead of the 3.798 trillion shillings it had reported before.

Who owns the DAX, Germany’s pre-eminent equity index?

America’s consumer spending—which is about about 70% of all economic activity in the US—is once again being driven by a subprime lending boom.

No one ever really knows why financial markets do whatever they do. (Though it’s possible to have some pretty high-conviction guesses.) But this week, observers really had no idea what was going on.

The momentum is building in the American business sector. The latest revision of US GDP growth for the second quarter showed business investment rose 9.7% in the three months ending in June. That’s better than the 8.4% increase reported as part of the second revision of the GDP numbers. And much better than the 1.6% rate of growth in the first quarter.

Bill Gross—the man who earned the nickname Bond King from the financial press for his outsized media presence and years of outperformance at PIMCO—is leaving the firm to join Janus Capital Group, the company said in a press release this morning.

Like hyper-secretive banks and crystalline mountain peaks, the sound of soft, scattered cowbell clunks floating up Swiss mountainsides is deeply embedded in life in Switzerland. It really is beautiful.

It’s a surprisingly democratic phenomenon. Both wine drinkers and all-you-can-eat buffet gourmands report feeling more satisfied with selections if they pay a higher price. The latest research along these lines is from a forthcoming paper from the Journal of Sensory Studies, which finds that diners who paid a higher price—$8—for an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, rated their pizza as 11% tastier than those who paid the cut-rate price of $4. But the same phenomenon applies at the higher-end.

London, it’s not. But the recent rise of property prices in Dublin is pretty remarkable in its own right. Prices in the Irish capital are up 25.1%, year-on-year. (Largely thanks to the surge in Dublin, prices for Ireland a whole are up nearly 15% over the same period.) And month-on-month, Dublin real estate prices are up 3.5%.

We’ve been telling you the data look weak. Economic analysts at Goldman Sachs agree. This morning they chopped their growth outlook for the Chinese economy between 2015 and 2017. Instead of GDP growth of 7.6% in 2015, Goldman economists now see growth of 7.1%, falling to 6.7% by 2017. Goldman kept its 2014 target of 7.3% GDP growth intact.

If you’re keeping an eye on the developments in the economy and financial markets, a good chart is your best friend. Charts cut through the endless hemming-and-hawing of two-handed economists and two-faced market observers alike.

As skeptical as analysts are about the quality of Chinese economic data, the numbers all seem to be telling the same story lately. China looks pretty darn weak.

An engineer by training, Steven Mollenkopf climbed to become the CEO of Qualcomm—one of the world’s largest producers of microchips for mobile devices. As such, you might think he’d be a big proponent of carefully sketched-out career planning. You’d be wrong. Here’s his advice for new college graduates, from a Q&A style interview in today’s New York Times:

At times, the prospect of Scottish independence turned investors skittish in recent weeks. But the Scots’ decision to stay in the UK didn’t affect investors much. Instead, the large stock markets all seemed to take their cues from the sturdy economic growth of an actual breakaway from the British: the US.