China GDP grows 6.9%, new life at Chernobyl and the painful price of hangovers

The daily briefing “FirstFT” from the Financial Times.

China’s economy grew faster than expected in the third quarter, as resilient growth in the emerging services sector helped compensate for weakness in manufacturing and property.

The country’s statistics bureau on Monday said GDP rose 6.9 per cent – the slowest quarterly growth rate since the first quarter of 2009 but higher than expectations of 6.7 per cent in a Bloomberg poll. (FT)

In the news

Deutsche Bank’s overhaul The German lender announced the departure of a number of senior executives and split its powerful investment banking unit in the latest upheaval sweeping Europe’s big institutions. (FT)

Pepsi ends India innings The scandal-plagued Indian Premier League cricket tournament was hit for six on Sunday when PepsiCo pulled out of its $62m sponsorship deal for the annual event. Neither the beverage group nor the sport’s governing body in India commented on the termination, but earlier reports suggested it was related to the governance of the game. (FT)

An unprecedented kowtow From Buckingham Palace to the country’s nuclear power plants, almost every aspect of the British state is to be thrown open to Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visits this week. But the red-carpet treatment has baffled Britain’s traditional allies, who view the behaviour as bizarre at best and dangerous at worst. (FT)

Alibaba works to stay off US blacklist The Chinese ecommerce group is lobbying to keep itself from being included on the US trade representative’s annual list of the world’s most “notorious markets “ for pirated and counterfeit goods. Inclusion would be a blow to the company’s efforts to shed the perception that its sites are filled with fake goods. (Reuters)

Don’t count out that rate rise Nearly two-thirds of economists polled by the FT expect the Fed to raise rates before the end of the year, despite weakening economic data that several banks have warned may put the central bank’s inflation target in doubt. (FT)

It’s a big day for

Canada The slump in the price of crude, a recession and a series of scandals have thrown politics in the oil-rich country into disarray, and Monday’s election is expected to be a nail-biter, as a once-tight three-way race has shifted in favour of the Liberal party. (FT)

Read more about upcoming events this week.

Food for thought

New life at Chernobyl Nearly 30 years after the nuclear meltdown forced more than 100,000 inhabitants of the area to permanently evacuate their homes, a new kind of life is flourishing within the 4,200 sq km radioactive exclusion zone. The area is teeming with wild boar, several deer species, predators such as wolves, bears and lynx, and myriad smaller animals and birds, according to the most thorough study to date of Chernobyl’s effect on mammals. (FT)

Don’t cry for me Argentina As Cristina Fernández de Kirchner prepares to exit office, she will leave behind a country in dire economic straits saddled with a yawning fiscal deficit, double-digit inflation and critically low foreign exchange reserves. Could her departure offer a turning point for Latin America’s third-largest economy? (FT)

Barack Obama’s painful Afghan journey Parallels between the Vietnam war and the US’s current war in Afghanistan may be overdone, but there are some troubling echoes. Most notably, there is no credible end game. Washington still has not spelt out what it is doing there and the generals continue to drive the decisions, writes the FT’s Ed Luce. (FT)

Big Ben’s bongs … could fall silent if repairs costing up to £40m are not carried out. “There are major concerns that if this is not carried out … the clock mechanism is at risk of failure with the huge risk of international reputational damage,” said a parliamentary report in the UK which identified several problems with the 156-year-old clock tower. (BBC)

The painful price of hangovers A new report from the Centers for Disease Control determined that excessive drinking – defined as more than four drinks for women or more than five for men – was costing the US economy nearly $250bn. And the lion’s share of that figure was attributed to the lost productivity of hungover employees who either showed up for work unable able to function, or who didn’t show up at all. (The Atlantic)

Video of the day

Giving women a leg up Spanx founder Sara Blakely tells Stephen Foley of her ambition to help female entrepreneurs and bring “male and female energy” into balance. (FT)

This article is published in collaboration with FirstFT. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: FirstFT is the Financial Times’ editors curated free daily email of the top global stories from the FT and the best of the rest of the web.

Image: A man rides an escalator near Shanghai Tower at the Pudong financial district in Shanghai. REUTERS/Carlos Barria.