PMI suggests China's factory activity still growing, but barely

China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index stood at 50.2 for June, unchanged from the previous month and just above the 50-point level delineating monthly contraction among Chinese factories from expansion, Retuers reported, citing new data from the National Bureau of Statistics. The government is due to release second-quarter gross domestic product data on July 15 and many economists expect headline growth to dip below 7%, which would mark the country’s weakest performance since the global financial crisis. “Looking ahead, as real interest rates faced by Chinese companies remain elevated, we see that further monetary easing is still highly needed,” Liu Li-Gang and Zhou Hao of ANZ said in a research note.