From Bloomberg:
China’s trade surplus widened to a record in September as exports withstood the global economic slowdown and falling commodity prices reduced the import bill.
Exports rose 21.5 percent from a year earlier to $136.4 billion after gaining 21.1 percent in August, the customs bureau said on its Web site. The trade surplus climbed to $29.3 billion, a figure derived by deducting the value of imports from the number for exports.
China has stimulated the world’s fourth-biggest economy by cutting interest rates twice in a month to counter the financial crisis. The surplus swelled a record $1.8 trillion of foreign- currency reserves that may help the nation to maintain growth of more than 9 percent as a global recession looms.
“It’s not a bad thing to have a relatively large trade surplus when there’s a global financial crisis,” said Wang Qian, an economist at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong. “China’s foreign- currency holdings will help the country to survive the crisis.”
