China: gravity takes over in the stockmarket

Last Monday, the stockmarket in China fell by 8.5%, its worst day since early 2007, and second-worst percentage drop ever.

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Until this week, the Shanghai Composite index had rallied for three weeks in a row. Investors were starting to think that the government had managed to stabilise the market after doing practically everything to prop stocks up. It loosened monetary policy, stopped flotations and share sales by major stockholders, banned short selling, and bought stocks.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.