China’s Slowdown, Trade Deal on Brink, Modi’s Trillions: Eco Day

(Bloomberg) -- Welcome to Wednesday, Asia. Here’s the latest news and analysis from Bloomberg Economics to help get your day started:

• Earliest-available indicators of China’s economic performance point to a continued slowdown in November
• President Donald Trump declared that talks with China on the first phase of a trade deal were near completion after negotiators from both sides spoke by phone
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi must invest trillions of dollars on roads and other critical infrastructure if he’s to pull India’s economy out of its slump
• Fed Governor Lael Brainard painted a mostly positive picture of the near-term outlook for the U.S. economy while advocating longer-term changes in the conduct of monetary policy
• New Zealand’s central bank refrained from loosening mortgage lending restrictions as record-low interest rates start to rekindle activity in the housing market
• Confidence among South Korean consumers improved for a third month and signaled optimism for the first time since April
• Australian central bank chief Philip Lowe laid out his cards for unconventional policy: A government bond-buying program is an option at a 0.25% cash rate, but the threshold for such stimulus hasn’t been reached and is unlikely to be in the near term
• Underscoring the pressure on Lowe, S&P said Australia’s AAA credit rating would come under increased “downward pressure” if the government opted to deploy fiscal stimulus
• Hong Kong acts a bit like a lung for trade in goods: Merchandise gets pulled in mostly from mainland China, funneled through the city’s massive port and then exhaled again around the world, explains Jeff Black in the latest Terms of Trade
• Sri Lanka must come up with a plan to narrow its budget deficit as the top Asian issuer of sovereign dollar debt after China this year prepares to sell $3 billion of bonds annually
• Personal income growth has been surging in some U.S. political battlegrounds, including a third of counties in Pennsylvania -- which Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election
• Fires that destroyed Indonesian rainforests pumped out more carbon dioxide than the blazes in the Amazon this year

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Heath in Sydney at mheath1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nasreen Seria at nseria@bloomberg.net, Jason Clenfield

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