The china men  at the Hang sang stock exchange , Shanghai stock exchange and Shenzhen stock exchanges  are standing with their hands on their heads  for the past few days pondering when  the market will rise again , as the  recent  slump in the Chinese stock market gives  them the jitters.

A 20 percent plunge has not only brought back the reality of them touching the bear phase again , but is also giving   their  neighboring  economic  giants  India  a very nervous look on their faces as they suffer the slump as well  in relation to their neighbors falling  stock market.

China Securities Journal reported today that 879 listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges had posted their first-half results as of Thursday, reporting 114.3 billion yuan ($16.73 billion) in combined profits, down 18 percent from the 140.6 billion yuan recorded a year earlier.

Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Top 10 stocks

1. PetroChina (3,656.20 billion)
2. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (1,417.93 billion)
3. Sinopec (961.42 billion)
4. Bank of China (894.42 billion)
5. China Shenhua Energy Company (824.22 billion)
6. China Life (667.39 billion)
7. China Merchants Bank (352.74 billion)
8. Ping An Insurance (272.53 billion)
9. Bank of Communications (269.41 billion)
10. China Pacific Insurance (256.64 billion)

 

In the first half of 2009, revenues of the 879 companies reached about 1.54 trillion yuan, compared with 1.64 trillion yuan in the same period last year.
Steelmakers and non-ferrous companies’ first-half profits fell most among listed companies, with Angang Steel Company Ltd reporting a loss of 1.563 billion yuan. Jigang Group, Laigang Group, Yunan Copper Co Ltd posted 100 million yuan in losses each.

In contrast, companies engaged in finance, coal and liquor sectors recorded better performances as Bank of Communications topped the earnings list with first-half profit of 15.5 billion yuan.
China has 1,678 listed companies and they must release their first-half reports by August 31, according to Securities Association of China

World markets are looking  for some signs of  market recovery in china  that will bolster other markets to recovery as well.

china stock market Update :

China’s stocks rose 4.52 percent on Thursday’s close.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose 4.52 percent, or 126.00 points, to finish at 2,911.58. The Shenzhen Component Index rose 3.91 percent, or 438.43 points, to end at 11,648.35.

Links:

• HK shares rise in low turnover; China Mobile drags 20 Aug 2009 08:58
• Chinese stocks up 4.52% on Thu 20 Aug 2009 08:43
• Commonwealth Bank subscribes new shares of Bank of Hangzhou 20 Aug 2009 08:43
• Nestle launches coffee production line in Shanghai 20 Aug 2009 08:43
• Under-fire Taiwan cabinet to submit typhoon budget as recovery works begin 20 Aug 2009 08:43
• Group of Chinese Diamond Buyers Visits India 20 Aug 2009 08:42
• Global pact to push China to low-carbon economy: Blair 20 Aug 2009 08:42
• Research and Markets: 2009 Report on Global and China’s Electric-Vehicle (EV) Markets – EV Attracting 20 Aug 2009 08:42
• Shanghai shares bounce eases Asian fears 20 Aug 2009 08:42

One of my favorite classic scenes in the movie Moonstruck is when Loretta (Cher) says to Ronny (Nicolas Cage), “Snap out of it!” (view clip here — it’s toward the end — nice diversion). Well that scene plays in my head when I say to all the folks who are reporting bad news about global trade:

“Snap out of it!” Global trade isn’t going away any time soon.

In the meantime and if you are a glutton for punishment, read more downer news at the NYTimes.com, “Trade and Hard Times.”

Journalists get mad at bloggers: “Without real reporting, they’d have nothing to comment on!” Bloggers get mad at journalists: “There’s a reason nobody reads newspapers anymore. They’re dry and dull and wrong.” But the gap is shrinking: bloggers are doing more real reporting, journalists are getting more humanized (with all the digressions, opinions, and biases that entails).

So what if you paired an investigative reporter with a blogger? Reporters didn’t used to write their own stories. (Why would a good investigator be a good writer?) The reporter would be out in the field, knocking on doors and taking notes, which they’d hand to a writer at a desk, who would turn them into a coherent, vivid story. (Newsweek still operates this way.)

Replace the writer with a blogger. They’d post the story as it unfolded, capturing the excitement of discovery: the big breaks, the wrong turns, the moment when it all comes together. Like any talented blogger, they’d keep people coming back: What happens next? I want to know more! They’d keep up a conversation with readers and other bloggers, sharing new leads with the reporter. It’d be a powerful duo.

But blogging isn’t everything. You also want to recap the story so far: for those just tuning in, here are the characters, here’s what’s happened, here’s why it’s important. Keep a summary article alongside the blog and update it in tandem. It would lay out the whole story in one place, with links to particular posts or source documents for more information. That way everyone can always get an overview of the bigger picture — including the reporters.

You’ll also want a tech person around to help out. Many stories involve databases; you need someone to work with the reporter to parse and process the data, then work with the blogger to put the results online. And there are plenty of other times where a small program or some tech knowledge comes in handy.

And you’ll need a lawyer on staff. Getting information isn’t easy. You’ll need someone who can file FOIA lawsuits and respond to legal threats. Maybe you can even file lawsuits against corporate malefactors and obtain documents in discovery. Then work with pro bono lawyers or public interest law firms to win the lawsuit in its own right.

Lawsuits are needed because modern investigations can’t stop at publication. If there was an era when a front page Times story could stop a scandal, that era is over. Ending abuses requires action. This makes traditional journalists uncomfortable. They see their job as reporting the facts, not changing them.

We may always need the detached journalist interested only in The Truth, but there’s room for more. Just as journalism needs to become more humanized, it needs to become more activist. Journalists uncover outrageous things, which gets people outraged, but they seem to think channeling that outrage into something productive is someone else’s responsibility.

Instead, a good investigative team needs a political organizer. They can build an email list of people who get outraged by their reporting and use it, along with blogs and the lists of other political groups, to put pressure on the bad guys, fundraise for further journalism, and collect a team of volunteers. The volunteers can help with aspects of the reporting — a modern investigation can get much further by crowdsourcing certain tricky aspects and depending on talented volunteers for particular tasks. A good political organizer knows how to get and manage volunteers.

But to make your organizing maximally effective, you’ll need (gasp!) a lobbyist. They’ll meet with representatives to encourage them to hold hearings based on stories you’re working on, where they can subpoena documents and testimony. They’ll ask representatives to introduce bills to address the abuses you’ve uncovered and work with them on legislative strategy to get those bills passed. And they’ll team up with the political organizer to get constituents writing to their representatives in favor of these bills.

The only way to get good at something is deliberate practice: trying various things and seeing how they work. But when it comes to making change, that’s very hard to do. Change requires so many people and takes so long that it’s almost impossible to say for sure that your doing X helped accomplish Y. Which means that it becomes very easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re more effective than you are.

But if you have one team — some reporters, a blogger/writer, a techie, a lawyer, an organizer, and a lobbyist — together, they form an investigative strike team: uncovering corruption, exposing it, and effecting change. They can watch the whole process unfold from a reporter’s suspicion to a writer’s story to a legislative fix. And they can get better at it. It’d be a powerful combination. That’s the kind of future-of-news that I want to see.

Adapted from an impromptu rant I gave to some people interested in funding government transparency projects.

I’ve spent the past year and change working on a site, watchdog.net, that publishes government information online. In doing that, I’ve learned a lot: I’ve looked at everything from pollution records to voter registration databases and I’ve figured out a number of bureacratic tricks to get information out of the government. But I’ve also become increasingly skeptical of the transparency project in general, at least as it’s carried out in the US.

The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations.

The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government. If you visit a site like GovTrack, which publishes information on what Congresspeople are up to, you find that all of Congress’s votes are on inane items like declaring holidays and naming post offices. The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure.

So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what’s really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a “success”: an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before.

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

But this is nothing new. The whole history of the “good government” movement in the US is of “reformers” who, intentionally or otherwise, weakened the cause of democracy. They too were primarily supported by large foundations, mostly Ford and Rockefeller. They replaced democratically-elected mayors with professional city managers, which required a supermajority to overrule. They insisted on nonpartisan elections, making it difficult to organize people into political blocs. Arguing it would reduce corruption, they insisted city politicians serve without paying, ensuring the jobs were only open to the wealthy.

I worry that transparency groups may be making the same “mistake”.

These are some dark thoughts, so I want to add a helpful alternative: journalism. Investigative journalism lives up to the promise that transparency sites make. Let me give three examples: Silverstein, Taibbi, Caro.

Ken Silverstein regularly writes brilliant pieces about the influence of money in politics. And he uses these sorts of databases to do so. But the databases are always a small part of a larger picture, supplemented with interviews, documents, and even undercover investigation — he recently did a piece where he posted as a representative of the government of Turkmenistan and described how he was wined and dined by lobbyists eager to build support for that noxious regime. The story, and much more, is told in his book Turkmeniscam. (His book Washington Babylon is similarly indispensible.)

Matt Taibbi, in his book The Great Derangement, describes how Congress really works. He goes to the capitol and lays out the whole scene: the Congressmen naming post offices on the House floor, the journalists typing in the press releases they’re handed, the key actions going on behind the scenes and out of the public eye, the continual use of emergency procedures to evade disclosure laws.

And Robert Caro, in his incredible book The Power Broker (one of the very best books ever published, I’m convinced) takes on this fundamental political question of “Who’s actually responsible for what my government is doing?” For forty years, everyone in New York thought they knew the answer: power was held by the city council, the mayor, the state legislature, and the governor. After all, they run the government, right?

And for forty years, they were all wrong. Power was held — held, for the most part, absolutely, without any checks or outside influence — by one man: Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. All that time, everyone (especially the press) treated Robert Moses as merely the Parks Commissioner, a mere public servant serving his elected officials. In reality, he pulled the strings of all those elected officials.

These journalists tackled all the major questions supposedly addressed by US transparency sites — who’s buying influence? what is Congress doing? who’s in power in my neighborhood? — and not only tell a richer, more informative story, but come to strikingly different answers to the questions. In this era where investigative reporting budgets have been cut to the bone and newspapers are folding left and right, it’s fallen to nonprofits like ProPublica and the Center for Independent Media and, from a previous era, the Center for Public Integrity, to pick up the slack. They’ve been using the Internet in innovative ways to supplement good old-fashioned narrative journalism, where transparency sites are a supplement, rather than an end-in-themselves.

For too long we’ve been funding transparency projects on the model of if-we-build-it-they-will-come: that we don’t know what transparency will be useful for, but once it’s done it will lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities. Well, we’ve built it. And they haven’t come. The only success story its proponents can point to is that transparency projects have bred even more transparency projects. I’m done working on watchdog.net; I’m done hurting America. It’s time to give old-fashioned narrative journalism a try.

Previously: Disinfecting the Sunlight Foundation [November 2006]

Tap into the right resources and the world can become your oyster. We wrote about one way to track your competitor’s suppliers a while back here (excerpt):

Another excellent way to tap new geographical markets, to minimize your expenditure of time, money, and energy, and to help focus your overseas sales and marketing efforts is to use the Port Import/Export Reporting Service (PIERS). PIERS (www.piers.com) is the only information service that provides names of U.S. consignees or shippers as well as overseas suppliers, along with detailed descriptions of import or export shipments for the commodity of your choice. This information is taken from ships’ manifests by a nationwide corps of reporters and is loaded weekly into a computer database.

I once used PIERS on behalf of an American window blind manufacturer to find customers who were importing window shades into Capetown, South Africa. My client wanted to effectively compete with an industry giant already exporting to Capetown. After securing a list from PIERS that showed who was buying the competitor’s goods there, we created a direct mail package specifically for those customers. Using the PIERS list gave us the competitive advantage we needed to show the South African prospects the superiority of my client’s product and win them over as customers.

This week we stumbled upon a new resource that appears to be similar to PIERS: Import Genius — a search engine for U.S. customs data. We have no experience with it so we leave it up to you to explore.

Another resource is The Journal of Commerce which has been around forever. They have lots of useful global transportation (commerce) information too.

We suggest you check out all of the above, compare capabilities and let us know what you think.

And if you know of other best-kept secrets, please share (comment). Or maybe you prefer to keep the secret to yourself?