.....and early on Monday local time, Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics announced that Gross Domestic Product in 2020 growth beat expectations of 6.2% to reach 6.5% in the fourth quarter of last year, with the economy expanding 2.3% for the full year 2020, making China the only major economy to expand last year on the back of an unprecedented multi-trillion credit expansion.

That China's sprawling economy managed to calculate all this just two weeks into the new year was perfectly normal as nobody actually believes any "data" out of China; instead all that matters is what Beijing wishes to telegraph to the outside world, and for now that message is "all is well."

The "data" underlines a rapid turnround in the world's second-largest economy, which declined in early 2020 for the first time in more than four decades after the country was hit by the pandemic and authorities imposed a harsh lockdown.