an amateur economist could summarizeand simplify the Chinese economy as 39-37-37: anastonishingly large 39% of the GDP is capital spending,37% is internal consumption, and an amount equal to37% of GDP is exported. (These numbers do not sum to100 as we are not using exports net of imports becausewe are concerned with the vulnerability of total exportsto a weak global economy.) The U.S., in comparison, is19-70-13, disturbingly on the other side of normal; 70%consumption compared with 57% in both Germany andJapan, for example, and nearly twice that in China. China’smix is of course an utterly unprecedented one, and comeswith great advantages in booming times. Now, however,we might ask: how do you stimulate the building of a newsteel mill when rows of mills are sitting empty? How doyou increase exports into a global economy that is not justslowing, but is unexpectedly very weak? And are theygood enough at stimulating local consumption to have animpact on such a small percentage of GDP in the face ofa negative wealth effect from declining stock and housingprices in their local market?Simple old “Econ 101” thinking would suggest that theircapital goods sector will have a bigger drop than the restof the economy, and that export growth rates might slowfrom very large to even nil or worse