Global News Journal

from Reuters Investigates:

China’s rebalancing act puts consumer to the fore

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, now has 189 stories in China, according to its website. Soon it will have many more.  The U.S. chain has announced plans to open a series of "compact hypermarkets", using a bare-bones model developed in Latin America, the Financial Times said.

Wal-Mart stores are a bit different than the one's you might find in, say, Little Rock Arkansas. They sell live toads and turtles for one thing, The Economist reported. But they also sell the appliances, gadgets, and housewares that Wal-Mart stores merchandise everywhere.

And business is booming. Third-quarters sales in China soared 15.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the Financial Times story, compared with a paltry 1.4 percent inthe United States.

China's consumption has been growing. Quite fast, in fact. Yet it still acounts for just a third of GDP, compared with around 60 percent in Europe and about 70 percentin the United States. But that is starting to fundamentally change. A Reuters Special Report by Alan Wheatley, "The Chinese Consumer Awakens" notes that wages are rising fast. People are moving into new cities in China's vast interior, and manufacturers and retailers are following them. Call it China's great rebalancing act, as the government tries to promote more consumption and rely less on cheap exports from "the workshop of the world" for future growth.

Timothy Geithner certainly hopes to see this. The U.S. Treasury Secretary is counting on hundreds of millions of Chinese to spend more and save less. That way, Chinese factories would produce more for domestic consumption and less for export, helping to narrow the trade imbalances that are destabilizing the global economy.

Photo caption: Chinese vegetable vendor sleeping in open air market in Changzhi, Shanxi province. REUTERS/stringer

from Reuters Investigates:

Inside the Pirates’ Web

Reuters trade correspondent in Washington Doug Palmer had an unusual assignment: buy a fake Louis Vuitton handbag on the Internet, and take it to a LVMH store for a comparison test, before handing it over to U.S. authorities.

    What was startling was how easy it was to find websites selling a dazzling array of stuff online. This is the new face of piracy and its costing businesses billions.   No need to skulk around back alleys or some pirate's rental van to browse through footwear, watches, DVDs and whatnot. Just pick out your LV shoulder tote from a virtual catalog on a website based in China. It looks and feels like the real thing at a fraction of the price.

Counterfeit goods ranging from shoes to software seized by the U.S. government  on display at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center in northern Virginia, October 7, 2010.  REUTERS/Jason Reed  

    The bulk of these goods comes from China. The workshop of the world is also the sweatshop oif the world when it comes to making fake goods.

    Reuters Shanghai correspondent Melanie Lee and a photographer accompanied a private investigator to grubby neighbourhoods around Guangzhou to find the leather workshops that make these fake bags. She saw mothers and daughters through the windows working the leather, and young toughs outside serving as lookouts. Chinese authorities occasionally do raid these places, which are often run by triad gangs. Photographer Tyrone Siu stealthily took photos with his iPhone.

 Melanie and her PI then followed the trail of the fake handbags to an illegal market a few miles away. The Baiyun wholesale market, occupying a space equivalent to five football fields, is the biggest market for leather goods in the world. Much of the merchandise is counterfeit.

    The market is occasionally raided -- including the day they went. But the shopkeepers are used to it. It's like the Whack a Mole game. As fast as you can hammer down one operation, another one pops up somewhere else.

from Reuters Investigates:

In case you missed them

Just because it was summer, doesn't mean we weren't busy here at Reuters. Here are a few of our recent special reports that you might have missed.

Tracking Iran's nuclear money trail to Turkey. U.N. correspondent Lou Charbonneau -- who used to cover the IAEA for Reuters --  followed the money to Turkey where an Iranian bank under U.S. and EU sanctions is operating freely. Nice to see the New York Times follow up on this today, and the Washington Post also quizzed Turkey's president about it.

Blue-collar, unemployed and seeing red -- Chicago correspondent James Kelleher went on the road for this story about the long-term unemployed and what that means for Obama and the Democrats at November's midterm elections.

Even though he's been forced to move back in with his parents and has virtually no income, Stevenson opposes Obama's proposal to let some tax cuts for the wealthy, dating back to George W. Bush's presidency, expire at year's end in order to raise revenue and reduce the deficit. 

"How is more people, keeping more of the money they earn, bad for the economy?" he said. "The answer is -- it's not."   

from Reuters Investigates:

Enter stage left — Brazil’s next president?

Not every president has a police mugshot, but it's not so surprising in Latin America.

A special report out of Brazil today sheds new light on Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla leader who is likely to be elected the booming country's next president. She spent nearly three years in jail in the early 1970s and was tortured by her military captors. She's come a long way since then.

The product of more than a dozen interviews with Rousseff and her top advisers, the story gives a glimpse of how Rousseff could govern at the helm of a country that, with India, Russia and China, is among the worlds few economic bright spots.

The upshot: while Rousseff is not the leftist-in-waiting that many investors fear, there is legitimate concern that hers could be a status-quo presidency, unable or unwilling to push through major reforms to Brazil's tax, labor or fiscal structure. As a result, there is a risk that Latin America's biggest economy could eventually stagnate under her administration.

Watch Brian Winter discuss the October 3 election on Reuters Insider here.

from Reuters Investigates:

Dive in, the water’s fine

Special reports are the best of the best from Reuters, and this is the place to find them. We'll be featuring investigative stories, in-depth profiles and long-form narrative stories here.

Reuters has a global Enteprise Reporting team with editors in New York, London and Singapore, drawing on the work of some 2,900 journalists in 200 bureaus around the world.

To kick it off, take a look at this story from Frank Jack Daniel in Caracas. Venezuelans will elect a new parliament on Sunday and the opposition is hoping to make a dent in President Hugo Chavez's power.

Chavez has dominated politics for more than a decade -- as one opposition figure put it: "In Venezuela, you have to win elections like David beat Goliath." FULL STORY

We'll have more on Latin America tomorrow with a profile of Dilma Rousseff, the frontrunner in Brazil's presidential elections.