World's Second-Largest Economy In Flux

I’ve commented before that China has been moving away from a manufacturing-based economy and instead focusing more on services—financials, real estate, insurance, ecommerce and the like. click to enlarge While the country’s purchasing managers’ index (PMI) reading has been in contraction mode since March of this year, these service industries are ever-expanding. The problem is that the transformation has not been fast enough to offset the massive size of the manufacturing sector.