China's headline GDP drops to 6.9% in Q3

China’s official growth in the year’s third quarter decelerated to 6.9%, down from 7% in the second quarter, The Associated Press reported. “Continued downward pressures from real estate and exports caused GDP growth to drop,” said Louis Kuijs of Oxford Economics in a report. “But robust consumption and infrastructure prevented a sharper slowdown.” While the latest data marked the slowest quarterly growth rate since the first quarter of 2009, Sheng Laiyun, a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics, asserted that the headline figure’s fall “indicates the restructuring and upgrading of the Chinese economy are going steadily.”