PAGE 1 HEADLINE #1: "Crisis to have huge impact, China warned"

Headline Implication: Stocks continue to defy expectations. Recently, when the headlines were good, stocks have gone down and when the headlines were bad, stocks have gone up.

According to Zhu Min, executive vice-president of the Bank of China, "The world's biggest economies, the United States, Europe and Japan are very likely to post negative growth and that will have a huge impact on China. China has already seen a sharp slowdown in industrial profit growth and fiscal income".

Implications/Analysis/Comments/Remarks: In a global credit crunch, everyone is affected. Zhu should know. He works in the BANKING industry which is where this fiasco started with reckless lending from Fannie & Freddie.

According to Guo Shiping, director of the International Finance Institute at Shenzhen University, "We are facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and our exports have been hit hard".

Implications/Analysis/Comments/Remarks: Does this mean that China's trade surplus with the west will shrink, also taking into consideration the melamine scandal?

According to the Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Chan Ka-Keung, "(The government) will not cut spending on the major reconstruction projects. Public expenditure will not be reduced because of the bad economy".

PAGE 1, HEADLINE #2: Chris Patten: "Obama's election would be "gobsmacking for China"

"(Obama's election) would be the best declaration for what America, at its best, has stood for - the most globalised country in the world - because America is made up of the rest of the world. I don't think (that) it will be just the Chinese who are gobsmacked if America elects a black man as president. I think that the election of Senator Obama would send an extraordinary signal to the rest of the world".

Implications/Analysis/Comments/Remarks: In the US, anything is possible for anyone, but in China, anything is possible only for a select few. For example, in China, there are people who use famiily connections to get into top universities, including universities in Hong Kong. Some of these people even fuss to get in ("I'm a Ph.D. so my wife has to have an MPhil degree" - there's no logic in that - it's also illegal in foreign countries). This is disgraceful and in the western world, this is enough for institutions to seek disciplinary action against the applicants, but this isn't the case in Hong Kong or China. The children of government officials or government insiders are almost guaranteed of finding high-paid government jobs or get special privileges (remember the RTHK Director of Broadcasting post? the requirements were lowered from a university degree to Form 5 to accommodate a government ally). Even though he didn't get the job, this trend is disturbing, to say the least.