Why the Fed has a Wary Eye on China's Economy

At MoneyWatch:

Why the Fed has a wary eye on China's economy, by Mark Thoma: Uncertainty about the global economy is making the Federal Reserve more cautious about raising U.S. interest rates. That was Fed Chair Janet Yellen's message in a speech to the Economic Club of New York last week. This uncertainty is reflected in the Fed's dialed-back forecast for rate increases this year. In December, the central bank signaled that rates would go up by 1 percent over the course of the year, but that projection dropped to a half-percent at the Fed's most recent meeting.

And when the topic is the health of the global economy, the discussion is largely about the performance of the Chinese economy. From 2002 through 2011, China's average growth rate was a remarkable 10.6 percent, according to International Monetary Fund data. But that has fallen steadily to 6.8 percent in 2015, and it's projected to slide further to 6 percent by 2017 then level off in subsequent years.

But this forecast itself has quite a bit of uncertainty. China faces several challenges that it must overcome to avoid an even lower growth rate -- and perhaps a "crash landing." ...