China GDP Surpasses Japan, Capping Three-Decade Rise (Update2)

By Bloomberg News

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- China surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy last quarter, capping the nation’s three- decade rise from Communist isolation to emerging superpower.
Japan’s nominal gross domestic product for the second quarter totaled $1.288 trillion, less than China’s $1.337 trillion, the Japanese Cabinet Office said today. Japan remained bigger in the first half of 2010, the government agency said. Japan’s annual GDP is $5.07 trillion, while China’s is more than $4.9 trillion.
China led the world out of last year’s global recession with an economy that’s more than 90-times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free-market reforms in 1978. The country of 1.3 billion people will overtake the U.S., where annual GDP is about $14 trillion, as the world’s largest economy by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief economist Jim O’Neill.
China’s surpassing of Japan “is a marker of its increasingly dominant role in the global economy,” said Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the China division at the International Monetary Fund. “The resilience of China’s growth during the crisis enabled a number of other countries, particularly commodity-exporting economies, to ride on its coattails.”
The benchmark Shanghai stock index rose 2.1 percent at the 3 p.m. close today, climbing the most this month.

LONDON - The financial district known here simply as The City is a hotbed of the loyal Order of the Masons, who have a penchant for strange rituals. But Masonry has nothing to do with an odd little ceremony performed twice every day in an office at N.M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd.
Five men talk on their phones for 10 minutes or so, and then lower tiny Union Jacks sitting on their desks. And that's it. The London gold fixings is complete. It takes place at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., like clockwork. The same ceremony has been performed the same way, in the same place, and with mostly the same firms participating since the first gold fixing was enacted at Rothschild in St. Swithin's Lane on Friday, Sept. 12, 1919.
But gone are the days when Rothschild ruled the daily fixes [a.m. and p.m.] in gold--they quit the market on April 8, 2004:
Rothschilds Quit Gold Market & London Fix
The London Gold Fix has been a regular feature of the international gold market since Friday, September 12, 1919, when the five gold pool members met for the first time, at the premises of the London merchant bank N.M. Rothschild, and with Rothschild as the chairman. On April 8th 2004, N.M. Rothschild announced that it was withdrawing from the gold market.
On the morning of Monday 5th May 2004, gold was fixed as usual, but by a telephone conference between three market member in London and one in Paris.